Louis B. Jones

No wind. Sunny silence in mountains all around. Getting out of a job of work, I tell Brett I’ve got to go back inside and “make tracks.” Unproductive morning so far, I got roped into helping remove hardware from mobile office for Brett (so she could wash, then paint), and having got thoroughly sidetracked, I told her I’ve got a two-o’clock appointment and, before then, I want to go back to work and “make tracks.”

Make tracks is exactly what happens. By the end of a good morning you’ve got a few pages, and they’re your tracks. You generated them, trancelike, by pressing forward. And looking forward is only one half of the experience. Real writing is looking back to see what tracks you’ve made.

* * * *

November 9, 2018

Vis a vis the world’s environmental plight, I think my sons’ generation — Hunter’s and Dashiell’s — will just have to take an interest in the project of hardship. They’ll need to be ethically equipped — and I think they are — to live in a world of slim chances and disappointed plans, possibly grotesque unfairness. Being smart and wise, win the prize Voltaire recommends, “cultivating their own gardens.”

Fires again in the west today. Near here, whole towns in conflagration. This antique ranch of ours is not long for this world, tinder, all made of boards, built in a time when there was moisture. The real disease the West has is a phenomenon called “evapotranspiration.” Which is this: the Sierra Nevada bristles with tall fir and cedar and pine, all over its slopes, and each tree is a straw: the tree breathes: and ground moisture goes up in its breath. That’s “evaporation” by plants’ “respiration.” Now, for every degree of global warming, the rate of soil-moisture depletion goes up exponentially. This is how the desert will be made here, as the soil’ perennial moisture deposit dries. The process will be climaxed in various places by wildfires that finish off the old tall dark lively forests. Leaving chaparral.

Presently, nobody is doing anything about this. I myself go on with my dinners of roast beef, plane flights, drives to SF for fun when public transp is “inconvenient” (while I know, because I myself thought it up, that the one Golden Rule of virtue for an environmentalist is to live as much as possible as if in abject subsistence-level poverty, holes in elbows, unwashed old car, beans for dinner), and all my liberal friends, too, adapt as little as do the truculent climate deniers. Everybody likes his job, his house, his shopping routine, his car, even his commute, hopping on a plane, air conditioning. People don’t like to perspire, apparently, nor want a sweater to wreck the ensemble they’ve decided on. If people wanted to think about the future, they might try staying home one day, not going anywhere, and beginning rudely to experiment with what they can provide for themselves on their own property. Or, in a city, the neighborhood forage. It would be an extreme, absurd experiment in “adaptation” — but the really absurd thing is, it’s precisely the adaptation that will befall. This adaptation will possibly mostly be gradual or, in some places, come with a whump. Our supply chains are going to have to shorten.

In general, my sons will live on in the direction of the 21st century. I won’t be here. They’ll get through it, even with happiness, if they can practice the kind of vigorous optimism of taking a creative interest in the problems of privation, catastrophe, hard knocks, and even justice in a competitive world where maybe all bets will be off.

* * * *

Oct 14 – Everyone has gone to Santa Cruz for a “strategizing retreat” and I can, in three days of solitude, read through the whole ms of “Strategic Metals” (presently so-called).

* * * *

Before she commits suicide by diving under train, Anna Karenina throws her handbag aside, and V. Nabokov wants to know, “What was in that handbag?”

* * * *

Tremendous fruiting of chestnuts. While pears have been a no-show this year, chestnuts are abundant and will become the new staple food for a while.

* * * *

Oct. 12, 2018

This diary has dwindled to dribs and drabs. I suppose I’m busy and distracted, or just finding the topic of myself unworthy or maybe the more convinced of my own inconsequentiality. So. Here is another resolve to be more faithful

* * * *

Happy, dinnertime listening to the radio as I cook, because the world seems to be taking an interest in the environment. Human beings are perhaps redeemable.

Some years ago I realized that my assumptions about life are bleak: (A) this planet, if we’re honest and serious about this, hosts the only place for intelligent life in the knowable universe; we’re not going anywhere; (B) here, various extinctions and holocausts are coming on so fast, they could start to hit even in my children’s lifetime; and (C) the existence of God (for me, anyway, living as I do in the open jaws of Pascal’s Wager)… Let’s just say “God” would be an entity with no inclination to intervene.

But this week the panicky – panicky! – report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has sounded the correct note of panic. Smart people are being allowed on the radio, and on tv infotainment shows, to talk about it. And to speak plainly. It’s been very lonely here, for many years, it’s been lonely being the only worried one. I should say in fact, it’s been lonely being the only one in despair. Even my closest friends go around making the old extravagant choices.

I have to give a reading in SF next week and will, again, read my “clothesline” piece.

* * * *

Mayans invented “zero,” too, all on their own (just like the Arabs, getting it from India?).

I realize “zero” is a tool. It’s a gadget, human-fashioned, with uses — like a pry-bar or a wheel. It’s a “discovery” of a pre-existent building-block in nature – but Zero’s nothingness isn’t something we see. Or experience. We had to invent a certain “nothingness” – or invent, at least, a little oval to hermetically contain a dose of nothingness, to serve as a tool in our thinking. In our thinking about the unthinkable. But then, everything is unthinkable.

* * * *

Sept. 2018

Again today, the chance to stop and be patient behind a halted school bus: the flipped-out “STOP” shingle, the many blinking taillights. Always a privilege. Kids (of every age, here in rural districts) will swarm out (or trickle out). Sit back, put it in neutral, put your rush aside, as if you happened to be present for the Northern Lights, the opportunity to be patient with schoolchildren, it almost somehow redeems me. The good effects a writer has in the world (if any) are going to be remote. At least this is a happy chance to do a certain job, just sit here, while the children get conducted off the bus and across the road (in middle of road: phlegmatic pear-shaped guy with his “STOP” lollipop) and get themselves across the street and into the safe channels.

* * * *

May 10

Hunter and Lindsey arrive from Wash DC. Take up residence in cottage.

* * * *

It seems to me I wasn’t hearing the rumble of bees this spring – not in the cherries, not in the pears or apples, not out in the meadows’ clover. Lots of blossoms, but no bee-hum. Now it’s beginning to look – at least in the case of the pears – that there are no fruit. The wild plums are fruiting, but so far, no little green peas sprout on pear branches.

* * * *

April 28, 2018

In SF, on errands, I’m on Polk Street, where two really tormented-looking, tired, butchered old trees, planted in sidewalk, are condemned by the city. Botched haircuts, dead stumps ending in failed sprigs, both are tacked with posters: “TREE TO BE REMOVED.” The fine print on the poster: the San Francisco Bureau of Urban Forestry has checked every box in the long list of potential reasons for removal. (“Poor Structure,” “Species Vulnerability,” “Superannuation,” “Detritus Litter.” Every box is checked.) Some inspector really must have disliked this tree, and, in the blank space for additional comments, has hand-written “Wrong Tree, Wrong Place.”

So I walk off thinking about the logic of wrong-plus-wrong. And of the possibility of two wrongs’ adding up to a right.

Surely the “right-tree/wrong-place” situation calls for death; surely the “wrong-tree/right-place” combination calls for death; but shouldn’t there be a vast wonderful forest for the “wrong trees” to be in “wrong places” and live in harmony? That particular forest sounds like a polyculture, and fertile. If there is such a forest, it’s where I personally would want to move in. Build my cabin there. (That forest sounds a little like San Francisco, where I did build my cabin.)

* * * *

BIODIESEL IS BACK.

This means a lot. This is a local occasion for global jubilation. I again have a backdoor connection to 100% biodiesel from agricultural waste. $4.21/gal. What a bargain. I have so many reasons to be wringing the old rag that is my heart. Now I’ve got one less.

* * * *

Note to Bob and Brenda:

You folks are aware, we’re building a Tiny House on wheels. (Are you aware of the Tiny House gambit? For our Squaw bookstore?)

So I thought you’d like this. We need to insure the thing, once it’s built. First thing I thought of, I called the old local State Farm guy who insures our house here. Described this thing (it’s on wheels, will be towed, etc.) and was put on hold, to be passed along to the in-house Authority on unusual insurance questions.

This woman turned out to be a Not-Good-Listener (one of those people perhaps neurologically predisposed to impatience). I described it but she wouldn’t let me get very far. “Well,” she said, “would members of the public enter? Other than writers and poets?”

Well, yes. Possibly, yes, we’d want to attract people. It’ll be the office and bookstore. It’s supposed to look cute, and gypsy-caravan, while creating work space for us. The ski resort has been less hospitable to us in recent years, than it used to be, and doesn’t want to rent us so much space. . .

“And this is just three weeks in the summer?”

Yes, the rest of the time it would be here on our property in Nevada City. Where, again, it would be our office.

“Well, if people are just going to write poems in there, I don’t know if it’s the kind of thing we can underwrite. If you were a legitimate business . . .”

I decided I hadn’t been clear (or she’d been a little deaf) so I tried to sound business-like. “Oh, it’s a business. We’ve got a board of directors — and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar budget (I think I may have exaggerated, because I was starting to feel insulted/belittled). We’ve been doing this for decades. People come from far and wide, from all over the world. And pay tuition. It’s more like a “school” business model.”

She pondered for a while.

“Well, will you sit inside this? And write poetry?”

I thought. “Possibly. That happens. It’s an office,” and I said so. “Though I personally probably wouldn’t. But yes, that happens.”

She was finished with me now and put the conversation away, “I’m sorry. If there’s poetry involved, we can’t insure it.”

* * * *

Wonderful remark of John Paul II: That in the Genesis Creation story, there’s a line implying a certain metaphysic — (he’s talking about the “and-He-saw-that-it-was-good” line. A wonderful interesting idea to have popped into God’s head: that anything was “good.”) Pope’s words:

“ens et bonum convertuntur” (being and the good are convertible). Undoubtedly, all this also has a significance for theology, and especially for the theology of the body.”

https://www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/jp2tb2.htm

* * * *

Hard times now: saying goodbye to Barbara Hall, who was such a good light in my life personally.

All the warmth and sparkle were gone long ago, but still they’re what lasts.

* * * *

Crossing the border at Nogales. I know I’m back in the USA, because when I search my phone for something beginning with “f,r,a,…,” one of the first auto-fill options is this urgency: “FRAPPUCCINOS NEAR ME.”

* * * *

Sitting on beach, San Carlos, bare feet in sand, beer, in shade of palapa, [this American diversion is not my style, but…] eating great Veracruz snapper in unwrapped foil. I’m reminded of Oakley, who in his latter days, 80-some years old, sat in precisely such a situation saying, “My blood pressure is going through the sand.” It’s got poetical echoes because Oakley was of that generation that saw in bullfighting a literary value, and valor, and because in Mexico, arenas and sangre have always been so mixed.

* * * *

November 22, 2017

Short stories in a bundle have gone to Joy. Now I’m returning to “Immanence” making asked-for changes, and I’m put in mind of William Maxwell’s dictum, that a finer and newer sort of story employs “the sentence as the unit for advancing narrative, rather than the paragraph.” I’ve been reading so much old stuff – Ivo Andric – which requires extraordinary patience of the modern reader who is spoiled by prose’s richer density.

Which is good. Jerry is a stalwart. But hearing him say so made me think, what if new generations’ expectations and senses are so degraded, they won’t care anymore that the tapwater smells bad, because that’s just how the water is; they won’t really remark anymore that you can’t get “seafood,” because that’s how things are (and who, anyway, ever did go see a coral reef?) – and don’t care anymore if you can’t freely lie down in a meadow and breathe the air deeply. Or care that you can’t go outdoors between noon and 3:00, “because it’s nice indoors in the air-conditioning.”

Don’t we already live in a compromised degraded world, which, if it were portrayed thirty years ago in a sci-fi movie, would have looked like preposterous toxic filth and competitive meanness and unthinkable dystopia. – The climate-refugee migrations, the multitudes drowning as their boats capsize in the Mediterranean, the well-water you can’t drink because it’s full of fracking chemicals (Pennsylvania) or agricultural shit (Nebraska and Iowa). People are living in this. People think this is how it is. Nobody thinks it’s wrong.

What makes me think this way is our new president. His vulgarity and dishonesty are getting routinized. People get used to things. He’s changing the discourse permanently. People will think that gangsterish banana-republic politics and open bigotry are the real world. A world of “integrity” will be treated as mythic or legendary or naive. Same with a natural world that was once benign.

* * * *

October 28, 2017

Morning in the Annex working on “All Things.” Afternoon in hard labor excavating, with shovel and pike, old retaining wall. The moralistic pleasure – the Protestant or deist pleasure – of exhaustion/punishment/dedication, then glass wine reading Joyce Carol Oates’s essay in NYRB while eating pork sandwich in PlumpJack corner table, Squaw’s little den.

(Lucky me: I was sizing up that unlovely old aspen – which now really did have to go, because my digging would be exposing its roots. But my chainsaw is down in Nev. City. I might have actually felled it with a tiny pruning saw, but then I would’ve had this big tree lying across the road, not to be dressed with a pruning saw. And Kevin happened to come across the street with his chainsaw. Got it sawed-up and disposed in a half-hour. Now in the moonlight, ribbony woodchips are strewn in the driveway and across the road.

* * * *

October 27, 2017

Joy calls, early AM. Talking with New York (actually she’s in Rhinebeck, but) – I hear occasional incessant background “ding”: She’s got her laptop open and it’s the sound of emails’ constant impact. (The comparable thing here, on my un-busy meadow, is the Perseid meteor showers in August.)

The sheer number of needy people who are constantly assailing a New York agent! I think, “Well, I guess she loves that turbulence. Might feel a bit lonely if it stopped.” And then I think a little further, and I thank Providence for her. Those are (possibly) some of the most wonderful, difficult people in the world who are importuning her by email. And there she is, at her laptop in New York their catcher in the rye.

* * * *

October 24, 2017

“All Things”! Awake early.

Afternoon on grant-request folderol.

Angelo comes by to look at huge tree – wants too much money to take it down.

Auden, on the itinerant life of the writer who must be a public peddler of his own literature at universities and writers conferences (which Frost called “barding around”):

Since Merit but a dunghill is,

I mount the rostrum unafraid…

* * * *

October 21, 2017

Still on that inchoate story about “poverty” ethic.

Strenuous afternoon, cutting up downed cedar and sorting its slash. To roadside.

Letter for “Stern” grant.

All winter squash was brought in last night (pre-freeze), and Brett is out there today stripping the garden of all its summer festivity. Bare poles. Cadaverous heaps. The nightfall communal adventure of cooking out of our own garden is becoming routine in Aug/Sep/Oct/Nov. The pears in a gallette, the trompetta squash in rice. Roma tomatoes heaped in every available vessel.

Frugality is one of the elegances (a little-discussed, but essential elegance) of the kitchen, the cocina, the cuisine. Frugality the “beauty” element as in mathematics.

* * * *

October 20, 2017

Home again in Nevada City, get down traces of new Poverty story but intend to bring up “All Things” again, when I feel I’ve got a stance back. Still no word from Joy about “Immanence.” I think she’s considering how (whether!) it can be put into the world.

Fell the smaller of the two firewood cedars, and do a bit of limbing. Dash is staying home recovering from the removal of all his wisdom teeth. When I bring down these big trees, Brett and Dash bring chairs (wrought-iron, like in an ice-cream shop) and set them up at a distance in the meadow like a Victorian audience of spectators at a set battle between Indians and townsfolk. Little dog on leash.

* * * *

Squaw, three days:

Monday eve: Pick up a bit of lumber at Mtn. Hardware.

Tuesday: truckload last month’s slash to the Placer County dump; materials at Mtn. Hardware; groceries at Safeway. Fashion two post-and-pier supports for deck and install, as well as chuck to clog the house-corner weakness. Clean old ceramic tiles for annex stovetop repair.

Dividend of my solitude: notion of a story describing a new marriage and its invasion by the Prophet of Poverty in all his righteousness.

* * * *

October 16, 2017

Squaw Valley alone. As I get above the 5000-ft elev. the air starts to sparkle (October), and the little mountain maples are popping up golden. Then at 6000ft, the aspens popping up with different gold. Dry and stony now are the gullies that, last spring, were bouncing with wide snowmelt water.

Stop at Mountain Hardware, Truckee, for 3 doug-fir studs and the proper work gloves for this weather. In the truck, can of soup, loaf of bread.

On the drive, I’m thinking about what a vexing writer I am. I’m not much of a people-pleaser – (which risks being vexing to all, from my agent on down the whole chain of readership) – because of course “pleasing people” is the supreme desideratum of any commercial product. And writing is a commercial product. Maybe any human artifact’s one main desideratum, and reason for existence, is “to be pleasant.” I certainly do know all the “craft” secrets of making publishable writing and I’m a sometime part of the Literary-Industrial complex that retails those “secrets,” but yet – this is my hypocrisy – I’m unwilling to deploy them at my own workbench under the sight of my own highly esteemed reader. Whom I respect above all. Who recognizes poppycock and turns from it, needing the practical truth.

* * * *

Happy day: two neutron stars collide (or rather, collided 100-some million years ago), and their blip is detected here both by LIGO and by telescope – i.e., both gravity waves and electromagnetism registered the thump. So the universe is getting knitted together intelligibly by “science.”

* * * *

October 15, 2017

Back from San Francisco, where I always do well. Andrew and I walked all over town. Good food everywhere, good “Lit” celebration in the Mission.

The train ride, back up into the mountains, I’m starting to think, is a bigger pleasure than the drive, and not just an environmentalist’s obligation. San Francisco isn’t a small provincial town anymore, and parking alone is uncivilized.

However, from the train, the view is of the Union Pacific right-of-way and the California suburbs’ backside (not the old industrial districts’ backsides, which were wrought beautifully by working men, by necessity, entropy, oxidation). In the suburbs I see the California that is more of a disappointment, mean, comfortable, ignorant, self-aggrandizing. Reading “Bridge on the Drina,” by Andric.

Then, home again, I find the bears did get into the pears while I’ve been gone. Whole branches pulled off. Lost only 2 or 3 boxes pears, but the offense stings. (At least a dozen mounds of scat around the property. Could this be one bear only? Probably a mother and cubs.)

So I get a piece of meat marinating and I go outside in emergency mode to spend the afternoon saving a few banker-boxes’ full of pears. This occupies the rest of the day of homecoming. Soon I’m (this is a new experience) actually slipping-and-sliding in stepped-on pears and abundant bear shit underfoot while I work – because the bears, otiose as the upper-class Romans, shit while they eat, where they eat.

* * * *

October 12, 2017

Luke and Maggie and their livestock still here. Last night, they brought salmon and spanakopita. Today: I alone to SF, for LitCrawl reading, but also to meet up with Andrew, visit SFMOMA for highly anticipated show, and to be in the city I love, in its time of worry, during Northern California fires.

Brett gives me ride to Colfax for train to SF.

* * * *

October 10, 2017

Fires on Kentucky Ridge climbing up from Deer Creek. (High winds last night.) CalFire updates have said the same thing for the last few hours: “900 acres and rapidly spreading, 0% contained.”

The only people we know out there are Luke and Maggie, who in late afternoon come up the gravel drive in two vans, packed with framed artwork, file boxes, their two cats and three oddball rescue dogs, and about two dozen guitars and dobros and banjos. (A couple of these still in pieces, partly-built or half-repaired.) This is the best employment of a kitchen table. Cheese and fruit and tea, and corn chips and eventually beer. On kitchen laptop computer we’ve got the police-scanner all afternoon – its steady hum, its occasional rapid-fire burst of protocol and digits, and some interpretable info. We make a big roast, get out the better wine. In van they’ve brought, along with their chattel, their bottle of old scotch, and we get out tiny cracked demitasse cups and toast the vagaries of fate.

* * * *

This morning I’m working on somebody’s critique while all over the house, all refugee folk and their animals sleep. At dawn the sound of helicopters starts up again, and CDF spotter planes, followed by retardant-dropping bombers with the sloping red bar on the fuselage like the heraldic bend sinister, flying low and heavy over the meadow.

* * * *

October 8, 2017

Sunday.

Short story again. Resist editing work, as I could use a day or two’s “distance” on that.

Then get a start on pears. Bring in just four boxes, with plenty still out there. They’re not ripening correctly, variously precocious after this hot-and-dry summer. Some hard-green, while many lie mushy gold on the ground.

Dash and his friends are in the mud room, and while I climb in pear branches, I can hear plenty of laughter. There’s a kind of an unchained, delighted laugh Dash has when he’s with his friends. Never heard except when he’s with his friends, it bounces off a new place somewhere in his chest, and it’s good he’s getting practice with that laugh. That will come in handy – in his outer life, and in his inner life. That’s what friends are for, I guess, partly.

By being judicious and patient, I can pick all the exactly ready-for-independence pears, which, green, will ripen together in their boxes on garage floor. Pears do better when they can mellow in proximity to other pears. There’s a pheromone they share as they soften and get complicated – (I think maybe “sweetness” is how the airborne chemical comes to human nostrils). Thus the ripeness gets turned on as a social thing.

* * * *

Evap. coolers all shut down and drained and covered.

* * * *

October 7, 2017

To Marin for board meeting.

In the mailbox, little padded envelope: Sands sends twist-tied Baggie of hard-to-get spice “sumac,” necessary in Israeli cooking: a powder so vermillion it looks more like an indelible dye.

4am, I see my neighbor’s lamp lit, and I think, everybody’s got woes.

* * * *

October 6, 2017

More chainsaw troubles, more delays, another trip to SPD saw shop. Since I sharpen the chain on my own workbench, I seem to be routinely getting it wrong: have filed one side’s teeth sharper than the other side’s. So now as I buck logs into rounds, every cut tries to yaw off in a fancy French curve.

The saw shop: two customer-guys come booming in. Heavy flannel shirts. Fella wants a saw. This one here on the wall will do, whyn’t you sell me this one here?

He’s a small, late-middle-aged, cowboy-handsome guy, his sidekick larger and quieter. He’s already got his checkbook out, but the two oil-stained saw technicians, joined by another customer (clean-cut bystander kid), all gang up on him and talk him into a bigger saw. That little one he’d chosen is for weekend warriors. He ought to have a good big twenty-four-inch blade, at the very least, and he won’t regret it. If he bought that little one, it would be in the repair shop all the time.

So he buys the big one. What the hell. Extra hundred bucks. The kid tells him he made the right decision, and the man behind the counter says again, that little one is for weekend warriors, as if he’d just thought of that expression. And the kid says again, ‘You’re gonna be happy with that saw.” (Yeah, gimme a quart of bar-and-chain oil, too. And a 5/32-inch file. Well, shit, I got the wrong checkbook.) He goes out to his car to get the right checkbook, and comes back and starts filling out a check, meanwhile complaining, grumbling as if to himself, “Take my advice, don’t get cancer. I already had fuckin’ chemo this morning. Fuckin’ awful. Don’t get cancer.” General silence. He finishes making out his check, signing it with a flourish, and the kid says at last, “Well…, you’re gonna be happy with that saw.”

Farewells, they get into their pickup (a few politically conservative bumper stickers; the truck is from the Highboy Mine, up in Allegheny, the savage boondocks; so they’ve made the long trip this morning to the hospital here in town), and the counterman turns to me, “Now what can I do for you?”

* * * *

October 5, 2017

Int. Monetary Fund yesterday: The recovery from the 2007 recession is complete, global economic “prosperity” has returned, and everywhere the human species is repainting/repaving/reengineering the earth surface. World economic growth is at 3.6% per year (says IMF). This is, of course, “good news,” and it’s being treated as such. Taking any other view of it seems perverse, cranky, merely picturesque.

The bear is back in the neighborhood. It’s the season when big hibernators have to do a lot of eating. Last night we had a forager here, evidently, and now I’ll have to be getting all the pears in, maybe on the too-early side, because they’ll be a temptation, and there’s so many, their depredation would be an economic loss. The prospect of early harvest screws up my week, slightly.

* * * *

October 3, 2017

Back to woodcutting today. Restoration of email makes for a tiresome pre-dawn morning, sorting, endless sorting, and in fact I give up and decide all this old bygone email is a waste of my time. Afternoon with Dash, a beautiful drive, Highway 49 to Auburn, Dash at the wheel, Bon Hiver on the stereo, for replacement of lost passport at the Placer County Clerk’s large, efficient, briskly-staffed new offices. (“How much do you think working in this place is like working at Dunder-Mifflin?”)

* * * *

October 3, 2017

Awake early, the “music-critic” story, working indoors in mud room, the season’s first woodstove-fire. Happy: a story isn’t made only of big things, it’s got plenty of details, too, plenty of small pleasures, which the writer in his habitual enforced austerity can tend to forget, and this morning the right details came fluttering in.

No work outside, this day: yesterday the chainsaw came apart in my hands – somehow every screw in the thing (muffler; cover housing) was vibrating loose. Unable to thread muffler bolt, where gasket has been heat-fused to the engine block. I brought it to saw shop under SPD Market and – typical small-town stuff – the gnarly guy down there wouldn’t let me just drop it off and leave it, he hauled it up on his low scuffed steel counter and got interested in the problem, so after about five minutes, I was able to bring it back home in one trip, eight dollars.

* * * *

October 1, 2017

Sunday morning, tinkered with music-critic story pre-dawn, but today will be mostly working outside. Yesterday I took down the bigger cedar (felling wedges did prove crucial: the felling cut approached the notch at a too-oblique angle and the resulting triangular hinge of wood wouldn’t flop: so it was tapping in the felling wedges that tipped it) and there’s maybe two days’ work there in the butchering, beached whale almost the length of the meadow, to be taken apart with diligence, parsimony: My ambition this time is to have almost nothing go out to the roadside for the chipper.

Brett has been fooling around with the staffing for Squaw, and she’s happy. She’s like her father, a strategist, a convivial strategist – and a creative-writing conference is similar to throwing a party, a kind of large-scale convivial strategizing. Sometimes discouraged about it all, this morning she’s been phoning Michelle and Lisa et alia and getting some hoped-for email responses, and she’s saying, “I’m so excited!” Her father always pretended to dread it, but she loves it openly. She disappears into the bathroom, drawing the pocket door, saying (about staff who’ve committed), “I’m so excited.” On radio, Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, keep kidding each other around and I’m suiting up to work outside. At kitchen table, she comes back, sits back down before laptop and she says, “I’m so excited.”

* * * *

September 29, 2017

Friday afternoon, to Auburn to view small offices on wheels.

Ingredients of a tagine, as Heather and Troy left us this choice lamb – cinnamon-cardamum-coriander. Turkish apricots.

* * * *

September 26, 2017

Greater self-sufficiency these months from maybe July to October: dinners provided entirely from within fifty yards of where I stand at hearth – (with, most nights, one exception; tonight the exception of thawed smoked-chicken sausages from SPD). Season of candles is coming back, as at this hour, beyond the pines, amber and salmon vie, also a curious bruise lavender. Dash has been somehow demoted from all his sophisticated Bach/Villa-Lobos, and he’s been assigned the Canon in G. Guitar notes arrive from the next room. – It’s an overused piece of music, but it gets its poignancy 100% back when it’s explored, haltingly, suspensefully, by a new cherub. We listen from the kitchen — and measure by measure, the Canon in G keeps emerging OK. The dog, tired from play, has been sleeping in a corner chair, and now his eyes aren’t closed: they’re half-open. – I think he’s not sleeping but “listening to the music.” That’s how it looks. The older I get the more I wonder about my fellow creatures’ states of consciousness and how they compare to my own rumored “consciousness.” (Dog has no verbal language, but he is informed by other kinds of actionable data far surpassing my own sources. I know a dog has got knowledge. Got it in spades.) What’s inestimable would be his “wisdom.” He’s getting to be a middle-aged, life-experienced dog now. And he may not know about Donald Trump or traffic-stoplights or the SATs or quantum physics. He doesn’t know that Pachelbel just went from the tonic to the relative minor, which, in G, would be E-minor. I do know about that kind of stuff. But I’m thinking such extra information doesn’t necessarily much influence my actual moment-to-moment experience of the world.

I’m not sure any “wisdom” I’ve acquired over decades is any better-founded or more useful than the dog’s. Literally I think our accomplishments are, in many ways, equal there. He knows it’s his boy playing that guitar in the next room. He must have some sense that those are ordered tones – so maybe there’s “aesthetic pleasure” for him in that. His belly is full, and he has some justified expectations that, soon, he’ll pile into bed with everybody. He knows all his people are here and everybody’s safe.

* * * *

More of the feeling-my-age department this morning, this dewy morning. Need to take down two cedars at meadow’s edge, one big and one medium, for 2018-2020’s firewood. For the first time ever, I may call upon (and pay) a “youngster,” that ubiquitous local creature – just because the one’s diameter is bigger than my saw blade’s length, and while I know how to fell such a biggie, I’d have to invest in some felling wedges. Most of all, though, I think a man’s mid-sixties can signal (be realistic) the age of clumsiness and incompetence and bad luck (the onset, anyway). The thing is, a “youngster” has gotta make a living, and, it turns out, wants a tremendous amount of $, just to fell it. He would be asked only to make two cuts and watch it fall down and leave, I’d stay here and do the limbing and bucking. Still.

* * * *

September 24, 2017

Sunday. The story of the music critic and the quadriplegic is done: at least a solid first draft to sit and develop a rind and declare its fine sourness.

More repairs to weir: I hike up to the irrigation ditch while listening (via earbuds) to podcast (three delightful brits in a Chelsea pub discussing Lowry’s “Volcano” novel), and I tack a finer-mesh screen over the face of the box. Dig deep in the metal box, arm’s-length deep, to scoop up the accumulated mud at the bottom, as fine and silky as what potters call “slip.”

Back home, with old pork roast, I’m making posole, getting exactly the taste, homey and dishwater-sour, of hominy and chilies and cumin. (The secret of a lot of Mexican cooking sometimes seems to be: stick to canned, store-bought ingredients.)

Dash has done enough raking today, in the perpetual, unfinishable project of “defensible-space” firebreak, and has gone skateboarding.

* * * *

September 23, 2017

I come into Barbara’s cottage and Brett’s domain there, after much work in the woods brush-clearing, thinking of myself as “hankering, mystical, gross.”

Brett has been interviewing Barbara, as she often does, about her childhood memories. Which are always the same few – but this time there’s an embellishment. Barbara thinks we all really ought to go back to her childhood home by the Sac river. All of us. Why? Because of the big lawn, where “you could run and scream and play all you want.”

* * * *

September 14, 2017

First cool day of the season.

* * * *

September 10, 2017

China this week reversed an old policy, sharply and without warning: Their ports have stopped accepting boatloads of our garbage, the stuff we like to refer to as “recycling.” They’re actually intercepting the boats in their ports, turning them around and sending them back to us. This will suddenly make an important American business unprofitable. I.e., the garbage/recycling business.

The story of the packaging industry, presently unwritten, is one of the great American scandals. Its booming growth in the 20thcentury. There was once a time when the general store in town had bins, with scoops. (“Container Corporation of America” was one of my father’s commercial film clients, in the sixties.) The attractive stylish “can” or “box” or “carton” is really the commodity Americans are laying out their money for. Reaching for on store shelves. Tearing open with their fingernails, or the leverage of a pop-top blister. What’s inside the container (beer? cereal? Los Angeles tapwater? sugar?) is less an interest or a care.

Years ago, in Midwest, I remember Pabst Blue Ribbon drinkers scorning Budweiser drinkers. And heaping contempt on Coors. Meanwhile, some were undyingly loyal to Coors and thought Budweiser horse piss. Or were gourmets and appreciated Michelob, looking down upon the guzzlers of Coors. Each of these people – everybody at the barbecue – was holding an aluminum cylinder containing pretty much the same stuff, possibly identical stuff, whose label-design they identified with.

After this China decision on garbage, we American environmentalist liberals, with our “recycling” bins out at the curb heaped up in affluence, we’re about to discover ourselves hip-deep in our own effluent – effluent of the paper kind and the plastic kind, pizza boxes, Amazon Prime cartons. – The old days of our great-grandparents’ filling their own jars or sacks at the store will be hard for the average person to envision ever bringing back.

* Affluentis Latin for “flowing away.” You’re “affluent” when your wealth is flowing unchecked away from you. Those natural resources in the “recycling” bin at the curb: they are our wealth.

* * * *

“Basurero” – Latin American term for one whose métier is “basura,” garbage. They who live in the gully where the avalanche of trash spills, eking a living there. Similar construction to “caballero,” “vaquero,” “marinero.” The point is, we’re all always getting closer to being basureros, if we plan on collectively surviving (with, e.g., compost bucket soup stock, with salvage lumber pile and recycling archive).

* * * *

September 7, 2017

How to iron out your short story:

Take out any “telling” and substitute “showing.” Especially favor dramatic real-time scenes.

No unlikable protagonists. Ideally, readers must “identify” with a character, which would mean creating a mix of only the proudest aspects of the reader’s personality.

Kill a few darlings, of course.

Above all, sustain the fictive dream. This means that the reader should be able to fall into (and remain in) the swoon of believing that these are actual events transpiring: the reader is supposed to believe that he doesn’t think about an author who is inventing this story, and actually to remain on that level of innocent credulity, throughout.

Such regularization can make for a very acceptable and publishable story.

* * * *

September 3, 2017

Squaw Valley. Alone without Brett. The dilapidated risers in the stairs that climb from the Annex to the upper road. The Miller party and the McClatchy party.

To accomplish the annual brush clearing on the hillside, for the first time ever I’ve hired an apparently “undocumented worker,” name of Placido (averted of eye, florid of complexion, bravo of demeanor, disconcertingly middle-aged for this hard work all day on steep slopes under sun). This kind of hiring is, on my scale, extravagant and elitist, but this year necessary/unavoidable. So today I have to bring Placido his packet of cash.

The note Placido left on the doormat, weighted down by a stone:

“PLEASE CALL MI” (followed by given name and matronymic and patronymic, and cell phone number). This note was jotted on the back of a page that had obviously been rolling around in his car for a long time. On the reverse side was the following information:

General Instructions

Tahoe Forest Hospital District

Emergency Department

Thank you for visiting the Tahoe Forest Hospital District-Emergency Department. You have been evaluated today by Brestens, Charles H., MD for the following condition(s):

SUBSTANCE ABUSE PROBLEMS: ABUSE OF ALCOHOL

ALCOHOL USE DISORDER WITH ALCOHOL ABUSE. ANXIETY REACTION WITH TOTAL BODY NUMBNESS NOW RESOLVED WITH LOW-DOSE BENZODIAZEPRINE.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Drink plenty of fluids. No alcohol.

PRESCRIPTION MEDICATIONS:

Diazepam 5mg: Take orally every 8 hours as needed for anxiety. Dispense fifteen (15) as needed. No refills.

Understanding of the discharge instructions verbalized by patient.

When Placido showed up to get his money, I of course didn’t mention the note. He accepted the cash in sealed envelope and pocketed it without counting it: I had to urge him to count it. He stayed for an hour, solamente para platicar. (Of Trump and immigration troubles, etc, Y sus hijos que no tienen papeles.) He may sometimes drink himself into oblivion, but – at age forty or so – did a much more thorough and far-reaching job clearing weeds than I ever do.

* * * *

“Spencer the Rover,” as sung by Chris on Idyllwild deck:

And his children come around him with their prattle-prattling stories,
With their prattle-prattling stories to drive care away.
And he’s as happy as those
As have thousands of riches.
Contented he’ll remain and not ramble away

* * * *

August 30, 2017

Flooding in Houston.

This Doomsaying Environmentalist might almost get a little schadenfreude pleasure out of this, nature’s revenge on Oil City, but this isn’t funny anymore.

* * * *

August 29, 2017

Back from Lucy’s wedding (wonderful). Back in the saddle.

* * * *

The Vatican has to devise a new, 21st-century policy: What shall they do about the supplicant, hands cupped for the wafer of bread, who is gluten-intolerant? The Holy See issues the following bulletin:

“Low-gluten hosts (partially gluten-free) are valid matter, provided they contain a sufficient amount of gluten to obtain the confection of bread.”

* * * *

June 21, 2017

William Maxwell, who edited fiction at The New Yorker during certain great decades (from Fitzgerald through Nabokov and Cheever and Updike, Salinger and Townsend-Warner and Gallant) was asked whether anything distinguished the magazine’s style. Response: “Something that is characteristic of writers who appear The New Yorker is that the sentence is the unit by which the story advances, not the paragraph.” I find that fascinating. My own work, too, puts a bigger burden on the sentence, in that way.

Lately I’m reading Dreiser, seeing how that now superannuated generation did make paragraphs the unit of narration. Turgid. Philip Roth claims Dreiser as his earliest influence, and one definitely sees that pacing, all that exposition. Even fellow Midwesterner Jonathan Franzen has a bit of the Dreiser-style exposition.

* * * *

In long email from John Clark, re: the Diebenkorn/Matisse show:

“Picasso: ‘To copy others is necessary. To copy oneself is abject.”

* * * *

May 22, 2017

All around the dinner table, lots of laughter. Maggie and Luke, Nancy Carlin and Howard and everybody. Barbara meanwhile, in her disorientation and constant panic-stricken distress, has been excused from the table, and from where I sit, I’m the only one at the party who has a steady view of her. She’s in a wing chair in the dim far corner, the fixed look on her face. She makes me think of the Auden poem: “About suffering they were never wrong, the old Masters… They never forgot that even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”

* * * *

March 16, 2017

Noticing how disloyal I’m being to this diary. Letting months go by without entering anything. I suppose I get tired of the self-regarding aspect of it. Not knowing really anymore what are my motives for keeping it.

* * * *

March 16, 2017

Not to have the battery replaced in Barbara’s pacemaker was a decision made two years ago among the sisters. It seems that, at that time, they were told that the battery would have about two-and-a-half years left. This medical technicians can know with some accuracy.

That was a February afternoon. The implication is, if it comes on schedule, her end could arrive this summer in August – the month of being up in the mountains, the time of tennis in the afternoons, and gin-and-tonic, the time of sleeping outside under the dependable late-summer meteor showers.

* * * *

March 14, 2017

Stars are outshone by full moon. Jupiter is the only lamp visible, because moon’s light is diffused all over the sky, the pair of them, moon and Jupiter looking resplendent together these mornings.

Paradox, counterintuitive: The elderly are tender and impressionable, the young jaded and tough: Long ago, I used to find it a bore that wildflowers are so cute. Now that I’ve done a lot of thinking about death, not just death as a fantastic inconvenience or threat of misery, but death as a condition of life – I come up the road this morning and see the wildflowers lifting their small trumpets among roadside rocks, and I see what a heartbreak, what a gift, is their ordinary ambition.

* * * *

On the radio are the Nisenan tribe members Wanda and Shelley. When they were here at our house, I didn’t’ really fully feel the fact that this was their meadow. Literally in history, and in the present moment existentially. All my sins are on my head. My brand-new solar inverter is an Israeli product, which, I learn, is manufactured in an occupied West Bank village. So then I go Google-Earth searching for the factory. According to my internet researches, Ein al-Beida is an Arab village traditionally dominated by two old families. The factory land claimed by Israel, adjacent, is shaped like a guitar pick. Or like a Ouija board planchette. Get down on Google-Earth ground-level, on a Palestinian desert highway, there’s a bus stop shelter where two women in hijab wait. Can’t find out much more about the situation, so I give up, let my solar panels go on drinking the wealth of the California sun.

* * * *

March 9, 2017

Sprayed all fruit trees against fire blight, but I fear through my inaction I may have already lost a couple of apples.

* * * *

March 7, 2017

My car is parked by a creek, the freeway rumble audible but – (this is odd) – the hectic perpetual freeway tumult is peaceful. I’m watching a gray bird hop and peck by himself – identifying with him a little bit: the notion of empathy-across-species is still on my mind.

I think that that small brown bird and I share many assumptions, and are more cousins than not. Sufficient sheer data-storage space for “Assumptions” is about equal, between birdbrain and my own. The assumptions about the world I share with a bird are only slightly less than the assumptions about the world I share with, say, a local car salesman or a brain-damaged homeless man, or our president, Donald Trump:

This bird and I both know what the sun is, for example. That is, maybe I have an extra 0.005% more experience of a certain kind of data about the sun; but he knows richly what most of my experience of – and daily use for – the sun is.

Same goes for gravity. We share knowledge of it.

What a “tree” is. Its uses. A tree’s threats or nuisances. A tree’s beneficence.

He probably thinks I’m an “organism,” over here fifteen feet away. Which means he probably assigns me characteristics similar to those I assign to him: activity (motility), unpredictability, some kind of inner mystery, agency, this quality called “life.”

We both know about appetite, and a full belly. And (if only because I’m a potential predator who might lunge and grab him) it’s possible he ascribes “appetites” to me. This even though I’m flightless, featherless, dependent on a two-ton steel carapace. I may deploy other superpowers. So he’ll keep his distance.

He and I, in this sense, share a “contract.” I guess it’s a kind of “social” contract. He probably knows I’m not malicious. But might be hungry. We get along. We can share this patch of greensward. We’ve been sharing it for a million years.

All this knowledge is jointly owned by us not just intellectually, but sensually, too. This knowledge is in our shared biome. It’s in our smell-glands and on our epidermis, and it’s in our brainstems and spines and (bible phrase) our bowels of mercy. By this time, my two-ton steel carapace has carried me on rubber wheels to a different place, where there’s coffee and a newspaper, and I’m still thinking about this bird and the sensuousness of our shared knowledge, when, looking down at a page of the local small-town newspaper, my eye is attracted by an interesting headline, and without thinking, I tap the paper page right there, as if the text of the story would spring open under my finger.

* * * *

March 3, 2017

A writer ought to wonder why people read – why books are written, bought, lingered over at length, then either forgotten or cherished. Today, here, I offer a physiologicaltheory of reading (or maybe or evolutionarytheory of reading):

Reading is a slightly unnatural activity. What the organism wants is to be moving about, moving physically, finding food and love and beauty and knowledge. That’s what organisms do.

So reading, as an activity, is then only for the sick one? The one who is too old, or too immature or inutile, for life’s real activities? The one not out foraging or flirting?

Well, there are two motives for the typical human adult organism’s sitting alone reading.

One is the desire for helpless distraction: By the tricks of narration, a writer can simulate life-or-death situations, amorous situations, situations that stimulate fight-or-flight or reproductive compulsions. Thus a reader can be drawn into wasting time in entertainment only.

The other is reading to enlarge your viewpoint usefully, to become wise, to change your life. In reading, you can learn about the world, make helpful revisions to your view of human nature, enlarge your own hopes for yourself, learn empathy, devise a sturdier attitude, etc.

I suppose the cleverest kind of writer combines the two.

* * * *

February 21, 2017

Went alone to see O’Keefe’s play “Times Like These,” in dramatic reading at the Foundry, with an audience talk-back afterward – because O’Keefe himself had come to town for it. The first question in the talk-back was directed to the author by a middle-aged woman in the front row, “You’re not Jewish! So how can you think about or write about the Jewish experience in the 30s?”

My heart sinks, of course. I complain of this to Eric the Bookseller afterward. How come people are (supposedly; in these times) only allowed to write about themselves? What would Tolstoy/Eliot/Woolf/Franzen/Chabon/Brophy/Shakespeare do under this constraint? Eric’s response is, he happens to be reading two James Baldwin novels presently, both mostly with mostly or entirely white characters. e.g., Giovanni’s Room. Thou Constabulary of political correctness, where did “empathy” go?

* * * *

Thinking about the race-and-ethnicity conversation in this land, as, now in the days of Trump, that conversation has been made more dangerously, hurtfully impolite and, at the same time, perhaps more frank and thus more important:

How class– way, way more than race – is a determinant: I’ve known people who might regularly spout common racist language but then have black pals they drink with in the pub and work alongside, and would attend each other’s weddings and funerals; also, I’ve known people who would die before uttering a racial slur, nor ever entertain a politically incorrect thought. But yet would be (quietly, implicitly) just as happy not to have African-Americans around the office too much.

* * * *

The standing joke is, how many book titles, these days, follow the formula “The Professional’s Female Relation” – (The Sea Captain’s Wife, The Hangman’s Daughter, etc.)

So it has occurred to me that, if I were to try to jump on this trend, my own personal private genre (my one-man genre) might yield up titles like:

The Insurance Adjuster’s Mother-in-Law

The Arby’s Franchise Owner’s Ex-Wife.

It’s an amusing joke but, also, it’s weirdly fundamental or axiomatic with me: how little I’m interested in the sea-captain situation, or the hangman situation. Interested in the insurance adjuster and the Arby’s.

* * * *

February 18, 2017

Big storm. Lots of flooding around town.

* * * *

How, early on, I saw that the writing I liked wasn’t written by adventurers and charismatic celebrities.

A writing mentor of mine told me once – (this was back when I was starting out: I twenty, he fifty-something, he and I in a place on Second Street in Sausalito) – that he didn’t like “closeted scribblers,” rather he favored the writing of people who have had experience in the real world, unique, important experience. In general, he didn’t like “closeted scribblers,” as a class. (I think he was alluding, at the time, to the stylists publishing then in The New Yorker.) I kind of assented, as a young protégé will. But I started thinking. And I started adding them up and decided I must prefer closeted scribblers. To have fought in a war, to have been lost in a jungle, to have hitchhiked across Asia and loved many exotic women, etc., those experiences didn’t necessarily give an author something useful to say about human nature or our particular lives. The people who astonished me, and changed my mind about some things or helped me live, were writers who had, in some important sense, stayed home. They’d written about the village, about their families, their neighbors, themselves. Or, in the rare instances of those who’d gone out abroad, those exotic places, too, were limned as “their village.” The ordinariness and limitation of most great writers’ experience seemed, paradoxically, a boost. Maybe the soldiers and explorers were somehow distracted by their life experience, from what matters.

I suppose this is a little bit of an apologia pro vita sua, which maybe I’m allowed at this point – because long ago I did make the active decision, and have continued to intervene this way in my own fate: not to go Paris or join the Merchant Marine or hitchhike cross-country. I was at my post when I was writing at the Dunkin’ Donuts counter, or the IHOP’s vinyl-upholstered booth, Home of the Bottomless Coffee Pot.

* * * *

Trump and the American ethic “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich”:

It’s fine that Donald Trump wants to make money. Nothing wrong with it. “Somebody’s gotta do it” is a profound principle, an indispensable macroeconomic fact. Somebody does have to be the “intestine” of the body, such people as J.P. Morgan, Carl Icahn, etc., the intestine lazy and warm, and moist and comfy and lustrous and rich in its darkness, so the rest of us can be the body’s “mind” and “eyes” and “hands” and “ears” and swift “legs” and stalwart “heart” and all the other members with more interesting roles. Without the few hedge fund geniuses, we of the body’s arms and legs and brain wouldn’t get our nutrition.

Trump ought not to think or pretend that others are “failures” or “losers” if they haven’t made money. My brother at the University of Iowa regional hospital: he was always fascinated with psychology, neurology, the brain, and he would never trade the life of a billionaire tycoon for his daily problem-solving in the clinic there. My sister the lawyer is a federal prosecutor, and she loves weaving a snare for truly awful guys, literally making the world a safer place, all on a gov’t salary. We mustn’t ask everybody to want to be “billionaires.” Let the ornithologist be an ornithologist, the poet with his words, the architect with his living spaces and public spaces, the schoolteacher with his children, the chef with his great ingredients and his fine plan – all these people are winners. Trump is wrong to think there exists some kind of “hierarchy,” or that the economy runs on envy alone. The economy runs on love.

* * * *

Niccolo Machiavelli, on the subject of reading:

(he did live in turbulent times; but aren’t these times as turbulent as Machiavelli’s; as Machiavellian as Machiavelli’s):

Here he is, on reading:

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.

I happen to be holed up with “The Fire Next Time,” James Baldwin – which I’d never looked into, and which Steve sends as a gift, and which well answers Niccolo’s description.

* * * *

January 26, 2017

New solar panels go up on garage roof today.

We’ve been without solar energy for five months.

Cost to me, after BPSolar’s warranty-refund and fed tax reduction, is $6,000.

* * * *

January 24, 2017

Funny hillbilly moment. Luke and Maggie and Sands and I are playing in the cottage, lamplight mellow, bellies full, drams of Scotch glistening, all musical instruments unsheathed and resounding – And in a lull, between songs, it is observed by our guests that that must be chicken shit on the wheel of granny’s walker. Yes. Looks like it. But nobody is going to get up and do anything about it, we’re all laden with, for instance, Luke’s great-sounding tenor-guitar, Maggie’s flashing accordion, dobro, etc.

* * * *

January 14, 2017

Asparagus goes in, 15 bare-root crowns in central raised bed.

(First sunny day in two weeks. During this week, we in foothills got 18 in. rain total, while local Sierra ski areas got 25 ft. snow)

Carburetor of the generator: dismantled, cleaned, rebuilt. (All while lying on cement floor of garage, in this weather.) All my life, I think I demeaned or else just pitied men who could clean a carburetor.

Derek Parfit died two days ago on Saturday. A man dedicated to clarity. He’s gone now – I never met him, of course, didn’t need to of course. The cool, clear, amiable thinking remains.

* * * *

December 20, 2016

Back on short story – girl in Marin juvie.

Thermocouple replacement for old stove.

(Bottle wine and signed book – delivered all the way out the Rough-&-Ready Highway – for my pal Dan, who counsels me on appliance repair.)

* * * *

December 19, 2016

Marin, for Hootenanny at Chris’s house, spend night. Then in the morning alone, luxury of an hour w/coffee in Fairfax – and there in the window, on tall stool at bar, is Sam Lamott with his son.

Biodiesel station in San Anselmo. Almost $5/gallon, but we might create a co-op in Nevada City for delivery.

* * * *

Christmas spirit, traffic jams, in downtown Grass Valley. In this season of commercialism and acquisitiveness, I’m thinking, while whipping out credit card over and over, “There’s a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together.”

* * * *

December 10, 2016

Waimea’s bequest arrives, long-posthumous (after a number of lawyers have monkeyed with it). The bequest, and the particular amount of it, makes me sadder than her death did. The amount is exactly right for life of solitary devotion, exclusive of any family. She did finally kinda-publish a novel – at least she held in her hands a printed book. I think wewere her family.

Couldn’t face mixing fuel, gassing up saw. – But at least I went down and, via lever-and-fulcrum, lifted the sections of trunk and rolled them on forest floor, So keeping them from turning to punk too fast. (Been lying around for a year or two.)

Limbed the thriving mulberry that has started shading out the solar panels.

To Sands’s tonight for New Years party.

* * * *

Last night I’m making stir fry. On the radio is news-story of a certain village in Germany: it has always loved its Neu-Jahr fireworks. Firecrackers and sparklers and rockets are this village’s favorite thing. But this year all are called off, in order to be considerate of the new sizable population of Syrian refugees, who would doubtless be upset by battlefield sounds. No Roman candles this year in the old medieval lanes.

My response to this (oddly emotional) news, here in a faraway foothill solitary house where I can be no material help to anybody: I find myself setting aside a plastic produce bag – on the drainboard for rinsing/drying/reuse, rather than throwing it in trash. (I’ve never yet been a Baggie rinse-and-reuser. First time for everything.)

* * * *

January 3, 2016

Sunday morning.

To bookseller Eric’s house, his famous weekly Brunch. Eric is explaining the predicted (to arrive in 2020) union between consciousness (human) and artificial intelligence (robots’). Such a union is called, by the author he’s reading, The Singularity. Across the kitchen, Julie is talking about her elderly friend with dementia who wants to die so she’ll be reunited with her husband, and who frequently recruits friends to come to the closet and help her pick out an ensemble, to wear in death, so she’ll meet her husband looking good. Her friends humor her in this. They pick out some really smashing outfits. I tell Eric maybe the Singularity isn’t to be dreaded, maybe it will be just wonderful. It’ll be a kind of bliss, a universally shared hard-drive, a community of omniscience.

* * * *

Liz here for drinks.

* * * *

January 4, 2016

Sleepless night, disorganized day.

Assistant: Simply “ironing” on the chapters of Isaac’s revelation and Abimelech’s accusations.

Passport photo for Dash, in a strip-mall place.

Another good rain supposedly coming tonight.

* * * *

John Donne: “Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.”

* * * *

January 5, 2016

Cheating forward some sympathetic views of character in the latter scenes. Also, importantly, putting enough flashes of “theme” in there to restore the story’s bone-structure. While the writer is allergic to “theme” and all coy announcements of theme, nevertheless on a subliminal level, theme is the raison d’etre. It’s the motive subterranean for a reader to read a book; the motive for its having been written. Since, in this version, I’ve chopped out all openly discursive parts, what’s left is at risk of shapelessness. Which goes to pointlessness.

Work out at club

A long deep rain all day. The meadows’ marshy shine.

* * * *

January 6, 2016

Finished with (rough) edition of Assistant with removed authorial presence. Don’t feel great about it, but will try to look at it freshly on run-through.

This downpour continues, it’s continual – it’s continually continual – and, lacking initiative to go out in it for supplies, I make stew (with, lacking beef stock, Marmite spoonful, little jar left by a houseguest of long ago).

* * * *

January 8, 2016

I can like to think I’m ever more unsentimental – it’s one of a man’s accomplishments: that a person can expect to be as disinterested (as cold-blooded) as a Zen roshi or an ER surgeon. Then the sight of some stranger’s infant can open door to swoon.

On Grass Valley street corner, in custody of his (tatted-and-pierced) hippie-kid parents, this particular baby was so new he was still shorter than his father’s forearm, the rosiness glimpsable in cheek-complexion an indication that the organism was vigorous, ambitious, not-to-be-worried-about.

Objectively, why the emotion, seeing any little babe? Maybe because the entry of a new human – someone who is distinctly not me, but yet might behold the Universe just as I have – would seem to thwart “solipsism” problem. Which is a problem that’s fundamental and legitimate. The so-called Problem of Other Minds is, certainly, not an everyday menace to my thoughts (or is never) – (because actually it seems beyond comprehension or, even, contemplation) – but it’s a problem that must exert a constant low-level pain, in any sentient being.

* * * *

January 9, 2016

After break in rain, a couple days of drizzle. Leah and Linda Connor for dinner.

Leah (her reconnaissance as newspaper columnist) reports that the city of SF really is – it’s no joke – losing its character to the vapid rich.

* * * *

January 10, 2016

Party for B’s B-day on Cedro Road. Beautiful sunny day is sacrificed to staying indoors drinking alcohol, eating sweets.

(Bit of solid work in the early morning, on “Tenderloin Girls” story.)

* * * *

January 11, 2016

Critique of Greg’s novel, mélange of stories about luthier families.

Open “Unpublished Writers” essay, because it’s time to polish it up for keynote-speech promise.

Lunch of squash soup w/old chicken stock.

I face the fallen oaks I’d neglected, at bottom of woods, mossy, but at the heartwood hard-and-dry. Leftover fuel/oil mix from fall cutting is still just fine. I get a little bit into it, mostly setting up the big trunk on the slope with pike as lever, using little log as fulcrum (it’s a pretty afternoon, working in a warm patch of sun on south-facing slope in cold woods), make some progress with saw, then I have to get Dash: Brett calling thru the trees.

After which, he and I go to Grass Valley and – because what he really wants for his birthday is a loveseat – we find the perfect one at Salvation Army.

The fun of getting the bulky heavy thing up the narrow stairwell, a kind of reverse obstetric process, requiring lots of strategy, lots of geometry. In which Dash takes charge. Makes good decisions.

* * * *

January 12, 2016

More of woodcutting.

* * * *

January 13, 2016

Dashiell’s birthday.

Heavy rains all day, nice ponding in the meadow must be evidence of California water table getting recharged. Carted the cut oak from lower woods to the cottage-woodpile, but in the process I’m reminded this is the kind of endeavor – peculiar to the self-sufficiency life – that brings on stupid accidents; in rural emergency-rooms grisly arrivals of embarrassed men with freak injuries. The wood-laden cart gets stuck on the west fork, path up from the woods – (my wheels spinning in mud) – so I have to pull the linchpin hitch and free ponderous cart to wheel it around in the other direction, on slope, then do a little bit of off-roading to maneuver around headed for the east-fork path. All for a half-cord. All works out, but I’m thinking all the while, it’s the unforeseen/unforeseeable bad luck that hurts even the most circumspect.

* * * *

January 15, 2016

Yesterday: The day knocked off-course by Random Unanticipated Little Crises – the contract with ski corp needs to be revised suddenly. Then news arrives that C.D. has died in Petaluma her sleep. Too young, and still too full of good work.

Wherever love is undischarged, that is a defect in Creation.

* * * *

What makes “mourning” simply a mistake in perspective:

Resentment of death is an error of “figure-ground reversal.” That this concentrated blaze of “consciousness” should exist at all is a pure gift unalloyed.

* * * *

Finally passport submission. So much trouble for what used to be an easy document. As the federal gov’t thins, it’s necessary now to drive to the next county to submit passport app. Post office there. Brisk opinionated “gal” in the blue USPS blouse stamps our forms and gives us plenty of advice.

Crossing back over the Bear River, the view is of winter’s four-o’clock golden light on live-oaks: these are not the Pacific NW colors anymore; everything is Mexican-looking. I always thought of my neighborhood as the “southernmost rainforest” (of mossy fallen logs, ferns, etc.), but no – in places, it’s a Mexican and (not Oregonian) Californian goldenness and stingy impoverishment. A John Constable palette and brushstroke, in the shaggy trees, the rambling, littered little homesteads. Somebody down in the Rio Oso gully keeps a skinny cow.

More and more, this California smells Mexican. Indefinable, but subjectively distinct. What is that? Like mesquite smoke, trash fire, sweaty cornmeal masa. Algo a comer! Is it just me, or is the entire economy somehow changing and it smells of it?

* * * *

Saturday. Country music on the radio, DJ’d by our local tongueless radio host – a tobacco addict, survivor of tongue cancer and radical surgery, who has had this radio show for thirty years and – (so doth he love this music) – has carried on broadcasting even after the operation of removal. He becomes intelligible to anybody who tries listening for thirty seconds. He has no consonants but plenty of vowels. His wonderful wife helps him, responding brightly, repeating his remarks sometimes, so the broadcast has an aspect of a sock-puppet show. A scholar of country music, he is treasured by the town. I’m handling emails at the kitchen table, while the song they’re playing an old song I’ve never heard called, “Let’s Get Drunk and Fight.”

* * * *

The hen that went missing yesterday at “bed check” (out there all night during the hard rains, presumed victim of predators) turns up in the morning drizzle, ambling around as usual. The blue egg layer.

* * * *

Buddhists list six sense faculties – the usual five (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste) plus “mind and mental objects.” Mind is one of the senses.

This seems a crucial difference, a doorway to Asian/Buddhist thinking. In the West, the thing that I consider to be “myself” is my mind – the existential ruling faculty that receives data from the five peripheral sources. But in Buddhism the mind is just another peripheral datum among five others, all convening on an empty center. There’s no hard silicon chip in there doing the processing. Makes “nirvana” more plausible. All thoughts are just another spectacle. Thoughts abide among the breezes and waterfalls, the birdsong, the lawn’s morning smell, the solitary cloud’s dissolution. Where, too, “I myself” abide.

* * * *

January 16, 2016

Steve S. visits. Brings two crabs so we have seafood gumbo while, outside the kitchen, the tin roof roars under endless downpour.

A string of planets – Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars, Jupiter – spread across the sky from azimuths low-in-the-east to high-in-the-south.

“Assistant”: I’m mistrustful of characterization-logic of the story, now that the framework of the Biblical legend has been removed. Why are these people behaving so badly, so weirdly, if not coerced by “fate”?

* * * *

January 21, 2016

Sleepless.

The accidental-pregnancy chapter I took so much trouble in adding to the Assistant has now been deleted. It’s back to its natural shape.

Adding complexity to the Bends’ characters. (For, with recession of theme, character shines forth: It’s as true in life as in literature: in the absence of any blameworthy “predestination,” character alone takes up the weight of responsibility.)

Me, I could almost actually (if quietly) rejoice, as the signs of “hard times” encroach. And rejoice with a certain amount of rational justification. It was forty yrs ago, people were warning “This civilization is so petroleum-dependent (everything plastic, everything transportation, everything grown from fertilizers), when the shit hits the fan it will be a steep adaptation.” So I’m a Grinch almost glad to see people’s investments come to nothing – investments in faux-marble hot tubs, five-bedroom house an hour’s drive from work, supported by a double-income marriage – now some of those people are, now, literally in colorful REI tents by the railroad siding, shopping-cart parked at the zippered door-flap. Those are people who aren’t the usual incompetent homeless.

* * * *

January 22, 2016

On the East Coast they’re expecting 2ft of snow. When I inquire by text, Hunter answers by text sounding (tho’ he’s in Maryland suburbs) like a “mountain man”:

Got the day off today. Very excited to get snowed in. Stocked up on beer and good food. Making meatloaf tonight.

* * * *

January 23, 2016

Saturday. No work today. Won’t be any tomorrow either. Today my speech at the college, then building shelves in the cottage attic.

Then tomorrow it’s high society. “Tea” in the morning at Kent and Cindy’s, dinner at Josh and Jen’s.

* * * *

January 25, 2016

Down the Old Downieville Road, the little hut (now expanding into a rich, rambling cabin). The elect pleasure of being a guest – and staying long at the table in flickering dimness, while the mom of the 14-month-old (quiet clever boy) is standing at the sink bathing the baby. A radiant steamy kitchen-light in that direction, all others at the table with their whisky or tea. It’s a cold night outside, and a long way up out of this canyon on a dirt road, tho’ we have to get going eventually.

Mud room stovewood supply replenishment: lots of trips up the slope with armloads, at end of day.

Discover Alan Guth lectures on MIT site, downloadable.

* * * *

January 27, 2016

Nevada section of “Assistant”: shading off the one remaining big hint of biblical theme. I think I’m happy with it.

Afternoon pulling Scotch broom, an especially vigorous aggressive invasion of it this year, all colonizing deep in the half-acre of blackberries (tho’ the deeper forest clearing is uncharacteristically clear of it this year). So it’s a sticky afternoon wading in prickly whips, revolving away from their thorny complicated embraces. Pick up Dash in town. (Delight of sitting in café, discovering on my phone a Nader editorial from TIME, republished on some aggregator site, that Hunter himself had edited and, basically, written. Then, by text, going back and forth with H. about it.)

My mother, dead these two years now, would celebrate her birthday today, an anniversary that, around here, will cause pretty-much-useless, pointless sad woolgathering and metaphysics. Which maybe is just the tip of the immense mostly submerged iceberg “gratitude.” Gratitude being a more useful result to be walking around with, than metaphysics.

Today also: the Iowa Caucuses. Rob is texting pictures from Iowa City, and they’re great photos: On a wide, glossy-varnished board floor with painted lines of free-throw circle, mid-court toss-up line, free-throw lane, citizens have set up folding metal chairs in opposing corners.

I’m supposing Iowans will be glad to see this day behind them, because political talk (esp. political ads) will cease. Political conversation is almost always frustrating. Political conversation is just a heartache. A kind of brute rhetoric even in the best-intentioned. Such talk is never up to the job it purports to do, or even thinks it’s doing. Political conversation, whether on TV or around an office water cooler, necessarily tends to veer from care or precision or courtesy. It really makes the crucial difference what radio station you choose to bring in. People’s sources of information are so idiosyncratic: those who watch Jon Stewart aren’t likely to read George F. Will. And vice versa. (I guess this is because most people have led only one life, not two or three, and their experience is limited. One group will lack the frame-of-reference to absorb George F. Will. Others the frame-of-reference to absorb Jon Stewart. You have to have led more than one life – and almost nobody has – to get a glimpse of impartiality.)

So it is, it’s extremely rare to have any kind of political talk with the necessary tenderness and specificity to make a civil discourse. That is, you want to be having a discourse where people might learn something. Whenever I listen to political talk, I almost always have the heartbreak sense that this person is playing a very clever, insightful game of “checkers” with life, while all around us, the actual economy is playing chess, a game of complicated, powerful, sweeping laws, totally invisible to the speaker and to me.

Iowa Caucus day happens also to be Groundhog Day. On these California meadows (winter sunshine) we’ll have sharp shadows. Sun not up yet, I’m wasting good work-time with long chatty emails. And this kind of pasa tiempo. My Facebook-contaminated email IN-box (“delete, delete, delete”) is overflowing with banner headlines like this:

“Maryellen Gelman Hadder invited you to like Maryellen Gelman Hadder.”

Which has a certain absolute perfection inviting delete — sealed exquisitely by the fact that I’ve never heard of Maryellen Gelman Hadder. But maybe therefore, on principle, I ought to endorse her. (“Like” her.), directed by an existential human condition, a categorical imperative.

* * * *

February 3, 2016

Making a decided effort not to work, but 3AM I’m wide awake and on the qui vive as usual.

So, resolved against working, I kindled the stove in mud room and read old Harpers and New Yorkers. The stale news turns out to be more interesting than any late-breaking. Will try to set up musical equipment and get a little carefree recreation this morning, then a day of quotidian errands.

Talk with Michelle by phone, with Joy by email.

* * * *

February 4, 2016

Warm sunny.

Another day of not writing. (Not Writing feels like loitering in an airport lounge. But it’s loitering I’m doing in my own home.)

Tonight will be the big reading in Sacramento.

* * * *

Feb 5, 2016

Had to come outside and get some parsley in the garden for garlic penne. Dark moonless night. Alone outside the backdoor, I always rediscover how silent is the world outside an ordinary kitchen’s hectic roaring sit-com. Balmy for February. (At a foothill elevation, where we get snow but the ground doesn’t hard-freeze, little crops like parsley will thrive midwinter.)

By the light of my cell phone I find parsley clump and I clip stems with thumbnail, then coming out the garden gate, I see Mars above east pines, the actual planet itself, and I think of the climate up there: on Mars’s North Pole, flurries of carbon-dioxide snow are piling up. (It has to be 193 below zero to make carbon dioxide snow.) How precisely damp and warm Earth’s climate is! Here I am in my garden with dewy parsley, but from where I stand, I can lay my eyes on that other landscape literally. Literally that land is in view, those rocks and dirt, looking reddish.

* * * *

(Then Venus, too. If I waited a few hours Venus would shine behind pines, and that planet the reverse situation: an instance of runaway greenhouse effect. It once did have water, but it all cooked off. Not even any steam left.)

* * * *

February 6, 2016

Couldn’t work today. To Sacramento with kids, to see Dürer show (plus a couple of little Holbeins). Nothing very good.

Then in the evening, a wonderful concert by Luke and Maggie & Co in Nevada Theater. A packed house.

After concert, at Chevron station: resolve to prepare “assistant” for Joy. (this after Penguin passed on “Immanence,” the usual rejection with high praise.)

[Interesting how “rejection” doesn’t get any easier with the years or after triumphs. It’s always important. It’s never unimportant. Nonchalance never comes along. (Moby-Dick’s Starbuck says, “I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale.”]

* * * *

First chapter of Assistant: brightening up the view of Brenda Bend (good will, wisdom, acumen).

Raking off old, deep pine duff on the front “lawn”: smothered. I so neglect the country place’s maintenance: I expose mostly wet dirt where there’d been a meadow, the grasses weak pale hairs.

* * * *

Brett sleeps deep, after last night’s fundraiser. Dog and two cats, al crimped hard in sleep, lodge around the edges of her.

In the kitchen at 4am while coffee brews, I open Brett’s iPad:

“You Failed!” it informs her, in girly pink script.

And below: “You didn’t clear all the jelly.”

* * * *

February 8, 2016

Another warm sunny day. Begin pruning, afternoon.

Morning. Doubts about the perceived “moral” fabric of the Bend characters. The devil is in that word “perceived.” Who is my reader, and how wise/forgiving/worldly is that reader?

* * * *

February 9, 2016

Second day pruning pears, afternoon, warm sun.

* * * *

February 10, 2016

Finish pears, lots of efficiency.

One ray comes from outside these acres: the news that gravity waves have been confirmed, from two detector arrays in the U.S.

The news is doubly jubilating: that existence does have a fabric is one kind of exhilaration; just as wonderful is that the fabric of existence was discernibleto a human mind’s thought processes (A. Einstein’s, a century ago), discernible a priori. It’s a pair of happy revelations. Really, the happiest-possible.

The USA likes to regard with condescension the world’s “failed states,” their anarchy. But as I look at this year’s primaries, it does seem (e.g., Donald Trump) as if The Establishment is losing its central, inertial, steady control. Trump is on the radio, celebrating his win, and these are his exultant words from the podium: “Politics is tough, nasty, vicious, mean, beautiful.”

Late night, at the kitchen table the Old Monk is playing with his iPhone: He opens up the “Uber” app just to discover cost of a ride from Heathrow to Chelsea. Suddenly the phone rings in my hand, showing it’s the UK calling “44+ 32423 234322.” It’s my driver. His name is Pablo. He is now circling the Heathrow airport in his blue Toyota Camry, looking for me.

Brett battles gallantly with dunderheaded cheap lawyer over the phone, “on hold” all afternoon, trying to make a simple change to Last Will and Testament.

Visit to an alternative school in Grass Valley.

Tomato-basil fettuccini at home in kitchen, while uproarious winds tear at the house. The NOAA wind advisory will be over at midnight.

* * * *

March 12, 2016

Back from London. Jet lag.

Start up new schedule of barley-fodder trays on shelves. (The last tray has thriven in our absence without regular watering.)

The brand-new apple is already showing a blossom on a twig which I guess means it’s ready for its first sexual experiences.

All the pear trees, hardly so virginal, are flourishing with blossoms.

* * * *

March 16, 2016

Last night in the cottage, in an interval when Barbara isn’t sleepy and needs a little after-dinner distraction (a soporific), we watch television. What’s on? A PBS documentary about the microbes in human intestines that form a community, keeping all of us individuals healthy. A particular tribe in Africa, living on a strict hunter-gatherer diet, happens to have the happiest community of bowel-germs in the world, and as a result they’re models of health and contentment. Pale unhealthy-looking scientists are there in the jungle collecting samples of these people’s stools, perhaps to bring them back to Berkeley, where daubs of that excrement may colonize the bowels of Californians, for their improvement. Barbara finds all of this confusing and a little alarming. It’s not going to make good bedtime viewing, as she gets dreams and nightmares from just-watched TV shows.

We change channels. On CNN – (because today is “Super Tuesday” and five states are holding their primary elections) – the most hectic possible reports of the close races. Hoarse politicians in littered ballrooms. And, in TV studios, analysts that talk too fast and too loud. Barbara and I can stand about five minutes of this, and we switch back to the scientists peacefully collecting the stool of African tribesmen, caching it carefully in vials, sealing the vials, sending them our way.

* * * *

March 18, 2016

Errands in town. Pick up taxes at the accountant, retrieve refinished Macondray table from the restorer, note cards from the stationer, bank deposit, wine, biodiesel.

In town there’s an old cemetery. It’s of the antiquated, 19th-century sort, crowded with little plinths and pillar-monuments so it’s, visually, a chess game. This is at the quiet end of town where the main street peters out. As I drive by, a very old man is at the closed gate – long white beard, elegantly dressed, with cane, no parked car in sight. He lifts the gate latch and enters, turning and closing the gate then after himself – as if to keep something in, or keep something out, or just to please his sense of order. Then turns to go further in, alone in the afternoon sun.

* * * *

Groceries at SPD. I ask the deli woman in hairnet for a pound, please, of the Virginia ham that’s on sale. Then there’s Gary Snyder, age 92, on his own grocery errands, five-foot-five, tramping on by, in military fatigue jacket frayed w/many pleated pockets and epaulets. “Hey! Gary!”

Talk of the writer’s “quest for novelty” and the deludedness of the novelty quest – “novelty” being a chimera – since in practice, each man all his life is always working out his one main idea. Talk of my Ginsberg review. Which I think he disapproves of, but diplomatically, saying “You undertake something there that I would not have undertaken.” (However, then he pronounces his own summary opinion of Allen Ginsberg that is precisely, word for word, from the review.) Also he disapproves of The Threepenny. The kind of poetry they publish (and of course he’s right about this) is lyrical and sentimental and literary: it’s not the gospel truth. Speaking of which: He has a new book out! “The Great Clod” it’s titled, after an expression of Chuang Tzu. I always end up devoting a half-hour (or as long as possible, and whenever possible) to Gary’s offhand instruction and anecdote in the supermarket aisle. (For example, his publisher Jack, in the nineties, brought out the big miscellany “The Gary Snyder Reader” because at the time, he was expected to die of prostate cancer, and they thought there should be a monument.) He has changed his views on China. Not so idealistic any more. “No! I’ve gone way to the other extreme.” He almost gloats over this. “For instance,” says the twentieth century’s most influential sinologist, translator of Chinese poetry since the 1950s, principal roshi of popular Buddhism in America. “I think they should stop using characters.” He grins it’s so mischievous.

“That’s saying a lot.” The reprise of the same remark expands it exponentially.

“I know!” Grin, joyous, ready-to-burst.

* * * *

March 20, 2016

Rain is predicted to come in again today after a short sunny spell.

Before the first drops fall, I’ve frisked up the entire chicken premises – fresh straw, fresh cedar shavings, water and food, and feed buckets stowed. Then back to “Immanence,” recently rejected, for a look to its possible improvement. Tho’ at this point, I think maybe I know what a good novel is, and know when I’ve written one – and the book business’s dismissal of it (if consistent) is just going to have to be a matter of misunderstanding and my own historic bad luck.

Joy reports back on Kim’s novel, unhappily.

Rain increases in intensity all afternoon. I’m out in my trailer, Brett in her office in the cottage trying to tamp down the fires of a sad little scandal in the poetry program: a poet seems to be notorious for his sexual high jinks, and now this will be a problem for the Administration.

* * * *

March 21, 2016

On my mind today: “a time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together.”

Rain goes on.

* * * *

March 22, 2016

Sun after rain. Cold steaming woods, brassy light.

Cavendish to borrow the truck for theater load-in.

Kerfluffle over Squaw’s ill-reputed poet will not be soon resolved. Painful for all. It simply gets worse, and bigger, people love it.

Revive inquiries into NEA money.

* * * *

Typical instance of elegance in the diction of a Cavendish communication, by text message (about a bit of damage to the truck’s rear bumper):

After I get current

Show open 4/7 I got

a tip for good body

shop at best cost to

fix the bumper. Let’s

discuss.

Great. Although the

bumper ain’t that

bad. . . Could they

just give it a whack

and charge us $50?

A little unprofessionally?

May I borrow

the truck for set load

in today, in exchange

for comps for your team

and program credit? I

need to tow the trailer

with reasonable loads,

other trucks to share,

and promise no more

damage. . . About that,

bumper Needs more

than a whack. I looked

under, it has steel angle

box construction,

needs removal I can

do and probly a

hydraulic press to

straighten it. I’m told

Hughes auto body is

good at such work for

restored function short

of pretty at reasonable

price, I would get a

quote. . .

* * * *

March 23, 2016

The climate outlook at 4am on my cell phone –

The Northern Sierra snowpack is now at 101% average. The Southern and Central still below.

New report from Jeff Hansen’s research team about acceleration of ice-cap melt; the northern ocean’s resultant cold freshwater layer will damp the deep ocean current transfer.

I squander a certain amount of prime worktime pre-dawn, because I’m playing around on a new NOAA website page: an interactive map of the USA coastal terrain showing zones of inundating tides – with street-by-street resolution – zooming in on places I’ve loved, on friends’ addresses, seeing what is predicted to be underwater.

Remodeling the finish of Immanence.

* * * *

Kale that was picked two weeks ago: in the back of the fridge it’s still as crisp as ever. In soup tonight (thawed turkey stock of Thanksgiving).

* * * *

March 27, 2016

Easter morning, the Bunny has been here. In the morning, deep-voiced 16-yr-old Dash has to pick (dutifully, sleepily) through the basket he’s been awarded (jelly beans, pencils in a 20-pack, 5-Hour Energy Drink in little 6-0z. plastic bottle, a pack of pencil-eraser caps, one big Chocolate Bunny, a Loofah back scrubber, beef jerky, a tube of ointment called “Blackhead Eraser,” a computer flashdrive – this is what the Easter Bunny wants him to have).

We’re supposed to be at Sands’s for a breakfast. Brett is delayed in getting her so-called challah in the oven in the cottage. The dough won’t rise fast enough. Meanwhile Barbara must be wakened and hustled through the pajamas-to-huipil transition. Meanwhile the sesame seeds that spilled on the oven floor catch fire and the smoke excites the four (4) smoke alarms in the cottage. Which can’t be tranquilized. Barbara’s pajama top won’t come over her head and she panics, arms pinned up in the full-nelson and the blindfolding. The alarms keep on blaring. Brett doesn’t think this is the slightest bit funny, this is the story of her life. The “challah,” in being rescued from the oven, falls in the sink, where a bowl that had spent a week in the chicken coop has been soaking. Is there chicken shit on it? Possibly on one end of the loaf. So just pat it dry with a dish towel, we’ll see, maybe we’ll just cut off that end. Outside, one can get away from the smoke-alarm blasts.

Outside on cottage doorstep. All the while, acoustically sweetened by arriving from around the north side of the house, arises the serene clatter-and-bang of the skateboard, failing and failing and failing to make its little leap.

* * * *

At Sands’s, Luke and Maggie, George and Diane. Mimosas and frittata. Much of the talk is theological, the difference between the basically Judaic three (Synoptic) Gospels and the Pauline version of “Christianity.” It’s interesting news to everybody, that Jesus was supposed to have “risen” in the flesh. All 133 pounds of him, levitating in an anti-gravity fashion, up through the morning haze, disappearing in the blue distance. Folks are slightly appalled to learn the doctrine, that it was flesh, skin-and-bones-and-gall-bladder-and-sebaceous-glands-and-the-little-farter-and-everything, that floated out of sight. (Just like one of those tragic helium party-balloons, whose string a child loses his grip on, but keeps his eye on.)

George, at the stove presiding over bacon and asparagus, narrates his heart attack of last week – myocardial infarction – burning sensation, attempt to nap while worrying about it, trip to Yuba-Doc’s, then emergency room, then on to Sac, in the valley, for the tiny camera via arterial catheterization. Today he’s as elegant as usual, same complexion, same deep adroit voice-modulation (great reciter of Robt Burns poems), one week post-heart attack, melting an entire stick of butter in a pan, pouring himself more champagne.

* * * *

March 29, 2016

Sunshine returns, but cold. Spring is definitely here: I’m in the deep rut now of Squaw-preparation work in this season when the three-AM rulership of Arcturus announces that Scorpio will someday-soon rise. Sing Lhude, sing cuckoo.

Chard has been volunteering, so it’s chopped up to go into the rich old turkey stock, plus big white beans.

Hens are getting back to laying at top speed.

* * * *

(There’s an old joke about the sloppiness of government work: “Just empty your six-shooter into the side of the barn – then draw nice targets around your bullet holes.” Such interesting technique has its moments of being useful – not just to a gov’t worker, but to any maker: a maker of soup on a stove, a maker of narrative fictions. Don’t identify your targets until after you’ve discharged.)

* * * *

March 31, 2016

Brett’s in LA for 4 days for the writing-program convention. Dash and I are bachelors here, and like a fire-station crew or any other such fraternities, console ourselves with epicureanism.

On our meadow, a string of hot sunny days commences, while far from this meadow, the Antarctic ice mass will be (according to new climate models) collapsing way faster than planned. Two-meter sea rise by century’s end. Other news, for this eutrophic planet: the world’s population of obese persons has today surpassed the world’s population of underweight persons for the first time in biological history: another ecosystem milestone. (British researchers in The Lancet)

Bruce here to install ventilation slots in cottage roof.

* * * *

Walking up Spring Street in town.

Up ahead, along the sidewalk, there’s a tree hugger – actually a person literally hugging a tree. The tree is the big far-from-home coastal redwood (sempervirens) that’s founded beside the doorway of the old radio station offices – and this person is hugging it full-frontally. When I go past, it turns out to be the zombie meth-head from Bonanza Market parking lot, he of the mildewed dreadlocks, and he murmurs to me specially, fixing me with his eye, softly as I pass, “I used to be such a good guy.”

Our small isolated town can be patient with a goblin’s public, slow, oxidizing death on a Bonanza Market tire-stop, however long it’s gonna take. But ours is a risk-averse society, too, and at the other end of town, as I pass Broad-and-Pine corner (headed for coffee), sirens are converging on the area from all directions. Plenty of them. One ambulance and two fire trucks (big red ones, shoebox-shaped, with shiny chrome faucets and hydrants and cabinets). They park up the entire area around the corner store there, and almost a dozen men deploy, first-responders all blue-shirted – but unhurried, sauntering – all pulling on disposable latex gloves (with a squeak and a snap), milling into the little corner-store doorway. I make for my coffee, but a while later, when I come out to feed the parking meter, the entire uniformed band of blue-shirted angels is escorting to the ambulance’s open rear doors a full-figured fellow who walks under his own power, rubbing his own elbow irritably.

* * * *

April 2, 2016

To Berkeley for Chabon bar mitzvah, having dropped off Dashiell at the simulcast opera (Puccini) in Grass Valley. Berkeley: Telegraph Ave: this town is always the same old unlaundered sock. I’m always confortable in Berkeley. Forty dollars for a night in a broken-plaster room off a kitchen, with mattress. The odd civility of boarding-house alienation: some stranger’s cups and bowls are drying in a dish rack.

Michael and Ayelet, and Sophie and Zeke, the shining boy himself Abe. An opulent meal for two hundred. The sun going down on the terrace. The lawns beyond. Berkeley’s misty willows and eucalyptus (pre-Raphaelite) on the far slope in amber and brass.

* * * *

April 3, 2016

Bad night. Sore throat and intimations of futility. Midnight stockingfooted in the Berkeley communal boarding-house kitchen: copper city-streetlamp-light falls on that same dish rack. In the morning, the overcast hasn’t burned off and I’m one of the first customers in the Caffe Med. Later, famous counterculture People’s Park looks like the morning-after battlefield of Borodino, the maimed and the disoriented beginning to stir.

Slow drive across the valley and up into the mountains. Stop for achiote paste and raw annatto, Mex market off University Ave, to mail to London. Stop in Davis for coffee and meditation by railroad tracks. Up in the foothills, I’m coming up Highway 49, and the motorcyclist who passed me back in Auburn is lying on his back on the center double-yellow line, in T-shirt and jeans, his bike on its side at a distance, while a paramedic kneels over his face, working like a masseur.

Home: it’s the same eternal sunshine as always, here at The Grinding Rocks. I set all the flock free, and I get the mower going and my cutting is limited only to the tall early tufts, leaving general mowing for some other day. Brett has tales of the Los Angeles party and convention, while I concoct something of kale, mushrooms, feta (sun-dried tomatoes courtesy of Amy and Luke).

*Vomer attritus sulco splendescere.

– Virgil

* * * *

April 4, 2016

Sunny. Unseasonable warmth is here.

Try brining pork chops.

Set traps in my trailer.

Fresh shelf barley-fodder.

Fire blight seems to have attacked the pears, so – maybe too late – I will begin spraying with anti-fungal sulfur.

“The Drake Equation” about extraplanetary life.

In town for bank, groceries, feed store, nursery.

* * * *

April 5, 2016

Hot day.

All storm windows come down.

Brett’s concerns over scarcity of poetry-program applicants.

* * * *

April 6, 2016

Thinking about how the mind works today, I find myself thinking of: “Where the ox treads, the cart’s wheel will follow.”

Oxen! Carts! – It’s just an old verse from the Dhammapada, but I find myself sentimental about the whole idea of an old agricultural cliché’s persistent usefulness in this day and age. I’ve seen oxen, in Mexico. Been around them. Still – here I am in the 21st century, and I guess I’m just grateful that our planet, its improbable, fragile biosphere, has survived long enough that I still know about oxen and that the metaphor is still lively. That there is still soil – not toxic or sterile, as on most or all other planets – and that I know about those gentle cooperative big beasts – is all a piece of ecological luck that our species takes for granted. The metaphor is still applicable in this brief biome: Where the ox treads, the wheel will follow.

* * * *

April 7, 2016

Today I’m keeper of the peace and distributor of justice on the place.

1) A certain hen — bottom-of-the-pecking-order Ameraucana — (this is our first instance of cannibalism in years of poultry) this morning was pecking her own fresh-laid blue egg and relishing the innards. Removed the whole flock. Pulled out laying boxes to hose clean. Will need to police more frequently for fresh eggs.

2) The little black spaniel from across the road sees chickens as sex objects. (There’s at least one hen across the road who actually seems to like him back). Here, too, he’s looking for a casual encounter, and needs to be called away from chickens.

3) Last night a large cecropia moth (wingspan as big as two playing cards) beat itself against the windows, with thuds, all during dinner. Today it’s been resting on the cat perch — where the blackhearted cat of course has started poking at it, patting at it. So the cat must be brought in.

I’m thinking, post-Berkeley-trip, that surely I’m acquainted only with a liberal Judaism, but it seems to me that, all over the country on any given day, thousands of thirteen-year-olds, in their bar and bat mitzvoth, have to stand at a podium and deliver an interpretation that is mostly about resisting or repudiating Judaism, or reinterpreting their Torah portion somehow, or actually (in one case I remember) deploring it openly.

* * * *

April 9, 2016

Saturday. Long period of misty light sunny rains over all these mountains. It will go on all week.

Board meeting today. Pleasure of morning drive to Sacramento with Brett. Pleasure of the colloquy of the fifteen around a long table, then wine and Trader Joe’s victuals.

Back home in NC, Sheila and Patrick from Berkeley will spend the night. Risotto.

* * * *

April 10, 2016

Rain.

Drank too much wine last night, wake with headache.

Long breakfast, Patrick and Sheila, before they leave.

Little bit of Squaw work, and no writing.

Sabbath activity, took many-miles walk alone in rain with hat and coat and good boots, through old Erikson woods, the long way.

(Today tried applying left-hand fingers to guitar frets. I haven’t played in the forty days since I banged my finger in departure-for-England hustle. The result was not good. The pain isn’t much, but the lack of dexterity. Still a little swelling-pressure. The one finger behaving like a toe.

Grass Valley: bank, accountant, market. (Smoke two trout. Always a bit of a project. The clatter of paraphernalia.)

Lots more Squaw work, all afternoon.

* * * *

New shelf barley fodder.

* * * *

Now Stephen Hawking is actively promoting the project of sending probes to Alpha Centauri, looking for habitable exo-planets.

He thinks it could be a thirty-year trip (making very optimistic assumptions about tech advancements that would make one-fifth-lightspeed travel possible) – and he thinks it behooves us to get off this planet, because we’ll want to dodge the asteroid strike or supernova blast that would inevitably wipe us out.

This all forces me to realize I have, over time, been firming up in my tentative (reluctant) conviction that colonizing other planets isn’t possible. Like, what if we’re stuck here. Fated to this dirt. I think Earth’s biome is infinitely mysterious, infinitely complicated, never to be artificially replicated in other solar systems (or to be luckily discovered either, out there). The community of enzymes in the soil, the community of bugs in our intestines, the community of bacteria that halo every doorknob, every bear in the Canadian north woods, every objet d’art in the Metropolitan Museum, every apple in the fruit bowl in my kitchen, every mushroom that appears as the fruit of the vast underground micorrhizal megalopolis. The mountainous statistical unlikeliness of a Goldilocks planet, the Fermi calculation forbidding intelligent life in the known universe, the Drake Equation narrowing habitable exo-planets to basically zero, the mysterious declining health of late-in-life Apollo-Program astronauts – everything seems to indicate the fabric of this our home is too delicate, too iridescent, too much of a rainbow, to be recreated in the sterile and toxic expanses outside our atmosphere.

The hopefulness of Hawkings’ idea makes me turn to consider my own broader existential assumptions – the working, rational ones. Probably sum up as follows: that we’re the only consciousness in the knowable universe (in this, astrobiology concurs), and that we’re not getting off this planet in any organized permanent way. And so, furthermore, that (as things are now going) the only existing intelligence is at risk. Rather alarming set of assumptions. But I think that’s what I go to bed with each night and rise up with every morning.

* * * *

Corollary of above thinking: all talk of space colonization (a la Elon Musk) risks being counterproductive to the environmental emergency work we need to do on this little blue sphere. It’s quite possible that a complacency, there, is secretly unconsciously prepared for us: we’re gonna be leaving this planet anyway someday, so poisoning it wouldn’t be the End of the World.

* * * *

April 13, 2016

A good day: The Peabody Coal Company declared bankruptcy today. Milestone there. Been watching for forty years thinking such a clear sign of progress could never befall, not in my lifetime.

(And Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County

Down by the Green River, where paradise lay.

Well I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking.

Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.)

* * * *

April 21, 2016

New shelf barley fodder.

* * * *

April 23, 2016

Long week dominated by Squaw work. Zero work of my own.

Reading Denis Johnson, “Tree of Smoke,” admiring his use of abundant details, obviously research-garnered but all deployed with huge discretion, in intricate web of quiet density, efficacy.

Saturday morning. A cool sunny day between rains. First spring soil preparation, Brett and I together in garden. The old clock-radio from garage workbench, long extension cord, sits on a terra cotta irrigation pipe of yesteryear. It’s broadcasting “RadioLab,” an episode about memory, memory’s decay, and the concern that, if experience is erased, what point is there to having any experience at all? The turner of the soil, with spade, keeps stepping with the sole of the same foot, mounting up upon that same stair-step of spade-blade, a kind of stairclimbing activity which leaves me, yet, still on the ground where I’ve always been. All the while, abundant hawthorn petals snow down on us and on the turned clods.

Paris Agreement on climate change is signed today in NY. 170-some countries. It’s a good agreement, but it’s too late. Should have happened thirty years ago. A lot of pandemonium is already lining up in the future – for us all – not just for the poor. (But mostly the poor).

* * * *

Dash has gone to The Junior Prom, Saturday night, country highschool (preparations entailed an emergency trip to J.C. Penney for a genuine bowtie), and we old folks are at home. Winter-garden vegetables for sausage of smoked chicken: kale and, at last, onions from old planting. “Prairie Home Companion” above the stove. Then “At the Opera” follows, and the radio announcer summarizes the plot of La Traviata: “It’s about a tenor, who wants to sleep with a soprano, but is opposed by a baritone.” (Which, he admits, was pretty much the plot of last week’s opera “La Giaconda,” except that this week, the baritone is the tenor’s father, enemy of any soprano-tenor congress.)

Well, it’s the plot of plenty of “literature,” the plot, supposedly, for the entire great Anecdote that is sexual civilization, baritones forbidding tenor-plus-soprano combinations. Dash, presently in the tenor role at a Junior Prom, is not going to experience a lot of opposition from the baritone, in fact. I think the Opposition of the Baritone is partly a merely legendary necessity. Most of the Baritones I have ever known (I flip back thru old girlfriends’ fathers, etc.) have been lenient, empathic, tentative, fond, reticent, backgrounding themselves against the scenery.

* * * *

April 25, 2016

Philosophical thought last night during sleeplessness’s long unredeemable hours: that some might want their cremated ashes scattered in a sunny glade, some their embalmed or else additive-free corpse in a pine coffin, some others a polished-granite mausoleum and a brass-band cortege to parade their caisson all around North Beach; some would prefer to be quietly unplugged in the hospital enblissed by medicines; others a simple surprise heart attack. The Philosopher would ask that, when the time comes, the six-foot hole be dug, and he be brought to it, so that he may undress and be laid naked at the floor of it where the clay is cold, the dirt fresh – (this to be even if it’s raining or sleeting) – and there be efficiently pistol-shot, face-down. After which, the shovelfuls of dirt.

* * * *

Advice via 800-number tech-support guy: Fix generator by just simply disabling (yanking out the yellow wire of) the circuit for automatic low-oil shut-down. It’s a safety feature but it malfunctions.

Car to Grass Valley for electrical-system diagnosis by clever home-mechanic Englishman who loves Benz jalopies, has a yard full.

More Squaw work. This time, for variety, setting up in a coffee house in town.

Find a suitable story for Chico reading. (The one about the Tenderloin prostitutes.) It’s too long, spend the morning cutting.

* * * *

April 26, 2016

Timed the Chico reading piece.

On “Immanence,” moved the cosmological revelation forward, to release contrived suspense in latter half. (Forfend the disappointment of that reader who expects sensationalism.)

Tractor mower repaired, thanks to the Internet “discussion sites,” that vast colloquy of all the bewildered guys in the world trying to fix what’s broken. (The solution: It wasn’t a carburetor issue. It was a mud wasp’s having clogged up, with her mud, a pinhole in the gas-cap, necessary for gas tank to breathe.)

To Grass Valley, where I must pick up the old Mercedes as revitalized by English mechanic.

* * * *

April 27, 2016

More of “prostitutes” story.

At sunup, mowing down entire south meadow, which is very tall now – destroying an ecosystem, destroying whole worlds, as my tractor keeps circling, pushing that tall wall a little further up the slope with each pass. Takes all morning.

Home from reading on Chico campus. (Breakfast with Troy and Heather. Great walk in Chico’s central wooded park.)

Back roads of Northern Calif with Brett. Almonds and rice are the crops; tumbledown homes at roadside where human accommodation is shabby but the domesticated plants live royally, taking precedence – (esp. beautiful at this moment in spring).

Building box for little greenhouse’s raised bed. Working in driveway – the garage radio, Nashville music, country music these days is produced like rock and it’s all about “small town values,” girl in cutoff jeans, small-town chauvinism, pickup truck, always over-luscious studio production.

Maxima Khan comes by to discuss her nuptials. Tour the meadow. The table of snacks and drinks will go under the cherry trees. Where to put the chuppah. They’re bringing their own chuppah. The men will enter by the cherry lane, drumming as they come; the women from the other direction, accompanied by celtic music (of Luke, Maggie, Murray, Randy). Cars to park in the west meadow. Bride and bridesmaids to dress in the mud room, with maybe blankets covering the windows.

The last bit of Squaw prep work is over with, as of this afternoon.

Fatty pork roast cooks all day and gets drained of grease (crust of fennel seeds).

* * * *

May 2, 2016

Hitting the same mushy spot in “Things”: the end-of-world theme.

Long workday, then the usual weekly run to town – feed store, bank, groceries, wine, plus the luxury of a visit to gym where I stay for a longer stair-climbing-machine ordeal, of the sort that should be routine. Try again to buy fuel at the backroad barn that sells Nevada biodiesel – vagaries of the black market: lately my biodiesel providers are never there: I call first and get no answer; I drive by, and the lights are on, the door’s not locked, the office radio is softly playing, and the Mister Coffee is still warming its carafe – nobody seems to be in back rooms – so I slip away again. Sign on the door: “BITCOIN ACCEPTED HERE.”

* * * *

May 3, 2016

Last day of sunshine before a predicted long spate of drizzle.

Loving “Things” so far (page 189). But I still haven’t hit the truly deep theological fens of it.

In Brett’s office in the cottage, today is the “Big Day of Giving,” when she and Amy will stay in their control center watching charitable gifts’ totals as they tower higher all day.

Working on the “Things” manuscript tends to put me in an awed (metaphysical, ontological) condition. Pausing mid-morning in west meadow at leaky spout, I made an iPhone movie. (A five-minute fixed stare on a leaky irrigation faucet’s steady drip, like a metronome, close-up, with birdsong in the distance, sparkling ripples where the drop lands.) and texted it to Hunter in his urban east-coast existence. The interesting thing about having kids – the rewarding thing, the ontological thing – is that you’re giving them the world. Here, it’s yours. Totally yours. I’ll be vacating it, you take it. But I mean really take it. Here’s the spiral nebula and Shakespeare’s sonnets and here’s all the Goethe you’ll never get around to reading, the smell of hot clothes in a sad laundromat, Bach’s solo cello compositions, warmth of copper penny deep in pocket, glimpse of meteor. It’s all yours. The (rumored) pyramids of Egypt, the mountains and beaches, drunkenness in some bar, the meadow in morning, a little stone church, the Pacific, insomnia’s anguish, the pressure-release in your ears when you step outside the train-station alone into the acoustics of the world, it’s all entirely in your possession.

(Which is redeeming because, actually, “you” are “me.”)

* * * *

May 4, 2016

At a little Beckett play in town. Intermission, in lobby I’m talking with a woman, a serious painter, fifty-ish, single, new-arrived in this town, an “economic refugee” of SF where she’d lived alone and painted for 25 years.

We’re talking about zeitgeists, about the decades of the seventies and eighties we endured, and how we both knew full well, even while they were transpiring, that those epochs’ “pop” culture, extending into higher-brow culture, had a huge waste-of-time aspect (70s = sexiness, cocaine; etc.), requiring patience of any people trying to live through them. Speaking about her arrival in the San Francisco scene, she cries, “Mondale/Ferraro!” in a kind of pining dismay.

I’ve been answering that North Beach of the 50s might have been a fruitful place to land. Meanwhile, we’re standing on the lobby carpet and a very tiny spider (small as a breadcrumb), is hanging from her projecting hair flip, and it has begun to lower herself on a thread, hanging beside her temple. I refrain from mentioning it.

* * * *

May 7, 2016

Dinner, Eliza and Carlos. The same South Pine Street house where Tom Gilson and Jann Bantiner once lived; still has wonderful big old miners’ fireplace with firebox big enough to, if not stand inside of, at least crouch inside of.

That house has the curse of Divorce on it: The sign of Tom’s and Jann’s marriage starting to go off was this: The mail would arrive, with bills, and it would collect on the kitchen counter for a week or a month; then, when it was time to entertain, it would be stuffed into a paper shopping bag, which would be put in the basement; at last, by the time of their divorce and the house sale, there was a long row of paper bags of unpaid bills on the basement floor.

* * * *

May 9, 2016

On “All Things,” more of rendering the supernal chapters purely mechanical, plot-functional, less lyrical or fanciful.

I happen to be reading Ralph Ellison; finding his more mechanical stripped-down narration (very Dostoevsky-influenced, as Ellison himself would avow) a good influence at this moment.

* * * *

May 10, 2016

Spray all perimeter blackberries. Get the weed-cutting device going with last fall’s chainsaw fuel mix (which still keeps on working fine!) Take out tall grasses around garden and dooryard and the stone wall along the drive. One cu. yard compost to amend new-enclosed ground, move from truck bed by the wheelbarrow-load.

Mow east meadow including front “lawn.” Recondition George Merrill’s ancient Rainbird” irrigation sprinkler, brass – like a model-T Ford – soak out the mud cemented in – and it works all right.

Light harrowing of the big long bed, then soil-plus-compost to add volume.

Sow buckwheat as cover-crop. It will be ready in winter when serious asparagus beds go in.

Dash is doing his first unit of the BYU Internet-geometry course.

Sands is in the cottage with Barbara.

End of day, deeply happily tired, it’s bedtime and I’m putting a screen in the upstairs window – and the screen swings around and knocks off the windowsill (where it’s been standing all winter) one of my favorite guitar slides, heavy glass in the Coricidin-D style but with a concave “radius” for Regal dobro.

I hear it hit the porch roof below the window and glide: either down to the gutter or out into the shrubs. Tomorrow morning there will be a search.

* * * *

May 17, 2016

To SF for Arion benefit.

Stop in Mill Valley, good old Sloat Nursery, for rooftop garden plants. At the Depot, the usual ham-and-gruyere sandwich – but nowadays put together with not much tenderness. In this town I’m really a disconsolate ghost standing on that same-old downtown square.

In North Beach then, on Russian Hill, a sweaty hour, many trips up the lane, loading in heavy bags of potting soil and mulch, plus potted star jasmine and hardy ferns. Then dress for Arion.

Diana Fuller, Whitney Chadwick and Bob Bechtle, Charlie Haas and BK Moran, the Garchiks, R.M. Anderson – the beauty of the Presidio premises, the old letterpress machines and the long corridors of flat wooden drawers labeled “Bodoni 14 ital,” etc. There’s even a drawer labeled “inkunabulus.” Inside the drawer, compartments of indistinguishable tiny lead slugs. What can an inkunabulus be?

* * * *

May 18, 2016

Coffee at Roma. Then I’m at the new SFMOMA, promptly at opening time, ten am, and I spend the whole day in that new five-storey museum alone like it’s a job. San Francisco now has a real museum, not just the pretentiousness that goes along with a museum, because, moreover, it’s got the goods. It’s got the possessions.

Terrible traffic home.

Nostalgic longing for the industrial South-of-Market neighborhood of long ago, when (infinite free parking, peace-and-quiet, maybe the clang of some metalworker or popple of pneumatic wrench, open skies, pavement weeds, artists’ lofts) it was like a sunny working neighborhood in some Midwestern town but adjacent immediately to San Francisco. You’re in sunny quiet Omaha but if you go around the corner, there will be all of SFO.

* * * *

May 21, 2016

Getting Squaw acceptances into the mail is an emergency in the farmhouse, displacing all the rest of life, dishes don’t get washed and people live on belated mac-&-cheese. Dashiell’s late-at-night-arriving friend is grossed out: in the dark, he has stepped on a rectangle of slippery salmon skin and his heel slid widely out from under him, on the kitchen floor. In the dawn’s steady drizzle, a Bic pen lies in the grass beside the Adirondack chair.

Pleasure of granting aid to applicants. And of having plenty of money for them. Maybe for a minute, in my life of selfish piracy, I’m entitled briefly to the Right Livelihood commendation, because this money is the real thing, it isn’t a toy that will break within a week, it isn’t welfare payments that might get spent on beer, it isn’t delusional religious promises – it’s the real thing, genuine good work in the world. On Brett’s Squaw computer the emails all go flying out – fwissshh, fwissshh, fwissshh, fwissshh, fwissshh – winged monkeys leaping out from the castle, but for good deeds and not mischief, flying out over the very map of the real world (as I have seen it in Google’s satellite views).

* * * *

May 22, 2016

The much enlarged new garden: all drip irrigation is in, thanks to Brett. Now three tripods for string beans. Long bed cover-cropped till winter. Lettuce and leeks in the back bed; double the haricots verts; double the tomatoes, double the summer squash and the winter, triple the basil. Big square grid of red onions in front bed is a complete success, just coming ripe now.

* * * *

May 25, 2016

Mow meadows for Max Kahn’s wedding.

Fine-tune irrigation in veg. garden.

To Davis for debut of Andrew Nichols’ operetta. – But then inexplicable California Traffic Apocalypse turns us back. Nothing to do but stop at Mexican place for a glass of wine while Northern California clears up.

* * * *

May 28, 2016

Saturday, the day of Maxima’s wedding. Port-a-Potties by the garage. In the early-AM meadow the empty white chairs are arranged chapel-like under the two oaks, focused on the chuppah. At dawn the streamers and bunting aren’t stirred by any breeze. By noon accordion and fiddle and reeds will be tuning up, the sound-system tweaking and bonking, the many drummers with djembe and conga be succumbing to the contagious urge to jam a little bit, just for the hell of it.

* * * *

Wonderful British philosophy (this is Derek Parfit):

“It is sometimes claimed that God, or the Universe, make themselves exist. But this cannot be true, since these entities cannot do anything unless they exist.”

* * * *

June 1, 2016

New hydrator system for the hens. I was skeptical of it – mostly the expense – but it’s great. Less work, more sanitary, water directly sourced from the pump house nearby.

* * * *

What to do with Barbara E. Hall’s vote-by-mail ballot?

vote it according to our own preferences

vote it according to our guess about her preference if she were younger or alert

dispose of it, because she is non compos mentis

We have to choose the last.

Still it will hang out by the fruit bowl for weeks.

* * * *

June 11, 2016

To Squaw Valley. The happy annual vertical migration: like the Piute, the Washoe. I believe the Nisenan of Indian Flat Rancheria stuck around here, this elevation all summer. They had the river, didn’t need to go anywhere. We interlopers, these days, travel in our comfort-bubble. My jalopy loaded with guitars, cooking condiments, basketsful of laptops and keyboards and charging cords and other iCrap, my ergonomic beachball-style workchair sphere undeflated.

* * * *

Kenneth Rexroth (1966, Sierra Nevada):

Here where the glaciers have been and the snow stays late,

The stone is clean as light, the light steady as stone.

The relationship of stone, ice and stars is systematic and enduring:

Novelty emerges after centuries, a rock spalls from the cliffs

* * * *

June 14, 2016

Still getting over this:

That the cosmos’s spacetime fabric is a gelatin-tympani, and that it trembles with “gravity waves,” was confirmed by an Earthly device rather like a tuning-fork (its one prong in Louisiana, its other prong 3000 kilometers away in Washington state, each “prong” a cylinder about two meters long). These two “interferometer” tines were set up to chime with the passage of any ripple in space-time that might happen to come through.

The particular remote plash that caused the ripple was a collision of two far-away-and-long-ago “black holes” (big ones, of 36 and 29 solar masses, respectively), which once upon a time slammed together to make a single “black hole” of 62 solar masses (the leftover 3 solar masses having been converted to energy, constituting the waves that charged outward in space). When the two colliding black holes were only 350 kilometers apart, on the brink of slamming together, they were traveling at a fantastic relative velocity of 60% the speed of light. This collision has been “by far the most powerful explosion ever detected, except for the Big Bang.” So said the device designer (making the interesting implication, too, that the Big Bang has been “detected.”) (I guess, obviously, the Big Bang has been detected.)

When our tuning fork apparatus detected the resulting wave here on Earth, the little shrug in space was a very slight movement: our two Earthly fork-tines detected (I see a fisherman’s bobber hiccupping over the passage of a pebble-toss ripple) a motion of 1/1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of a meter.

A pet is remedy for despair. If I were alone I surely wouldn’t own a dog. (Being too busy and frankly too self-absorbed to, fairly, take care of such a creature.) It’s only over my mild objections that Brett goes out and buys these things.

Still, on a night like last night, when sometimes realistic futility is inescapable, just to put a hand on the dog’s flank (he sleeps at my feet, or in the crook of my knee) and to feel the rise and fall of a fellow mammal’s breath, it’s the only light in Creation.

Sometimes this dog – (a lapdog, but one who spent his puppy years as a dog-pound prisoner and as a snarling fugitive on the streets of Salinas, California) – releases a sigh in his sleep: it’s exactly a child’s post-sobbing sigh, kind of a combination shiver-and-gasp, when the time of grief is over. This sigh, I’m sure, is the PTSD realization the creature regularly has: that he lives nowadays in a world surrounded by love he can, apparently, depend on.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: “It is a great mitzvah to be happy always.”

Open microwave door. Moth flies out of microwave before I turn it on. Then I turn it on.

Lou Reed on TV, in an old concert, looking young and still-rebellious, still slouching, still swaggering, but reading the song’s lyrics off a teleprompter’s tilted glass panes.

(his own song’s lyrics?)

* * * *

4th-of-July Weekend

Dashiell off to music school, far away in New Hampshire. Farewell at the Reno airport‘s TSA barrier. So he’s in care of his Guardian Angels now, going through security line alone, patiently, shoes in hand, good citizen, tall.

* * * *

After early airport run to Reno, I drive back up into the mountains and visit the Safeway at five in the morning: the busiest Safeway in Calif (as the checkout employees will proudly boast), on Donner Pass Road by Interstate 80’s Atlantic-to-Pacific artery. I’d never really experienced this at this pre-dawn hour. It’s customerless, but thronged with delivery folk, aisles in the dawn too congested to move freely in, the dozens of wheeled carts, the tall, ceiling-high spilling towers of boxes (onions, cheese, eggs, Pampers, coffee beans, bacon, wine), the sheer cubic volume of reshelved consumables that keep California nourished and active for another day, here on almost the exact same ground where the family of pioneers (Donners, Reeds) starved in their bewilderment.

* * * *

July 8, 2016

Funny sub-headline “tease” in the NY Times. Ordinarily, the death of a lake and all such climate-change news are deeply grave, and I have no sense of humor about any of it, but my immaturity sometimes prevails:

“An indigenous group that survived Spanish and Inca conquest cannot handle the abrupt upheaval of global warming. Lake Poopó was more than their livelihood: It was their identity.”

I’m only thinking, But wouldn’t they kind of be happy to be free of that lake?

* * * *

Phone for cord-and-a-half firewood.

Repair downstairs shower in Annex – (where the floor-pan is sinking and parting from the vertical walls) – by caulking lengths of rubber baseboard trim in a skirt all around the widening slot. This house gets more makeshift by the year.

Deal with manufacturers of defective bamboo blinds. All ten can be shipped back, at their expense.

String-trimming of the slopes around both houses to begin.

Michelle’s fine book of short stories!

* * * *

July 9, 2016

Saturday. Driving into town. I seldom get damp-eyed over world events. But this causes some useless emotion. On the truck radio as I drive along the sparkling river:

“…And then at eleven o’clock, we’ll be broadcasting our comedy quiz show ‘Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me’ – today an archived show, which was taped before the events of this week. Our weekend programming may provide a welcome break from the news of Dallas and Minneapolis and New Orleans. However, we at KXJZ will continue to follow developments and provide regular updates.”

So the radio show that was to follow – all the laughter and raillery and silliness – would transpire on a bygone but restored sunny Sabbath from last week, when people were innocent.

Why is this little circumstance such a heartache? I guess it just inserts an obvious measure of how painless are the increments of loss, everything we’re losing, like trust, like faith. I don’t feel the daily, weekly erosion, not until I’m confronted accidentally with a stop-action photograph of the diff between this week and last.

* * * *

July 11, 2016

Cutting weeds on Squaw slopes. This’ll be 3 or 4 afternoons’ work. With string-trimming device commercially called a Weed Whacker, at noon, come out from the Annex’s cold-as-a-basement air. And the hot sunny Sierra day outside smells like a fresh-opened box of Cheerios. Soon to be perfumed with all weed-cutting’s damp spices. We’ve got sparser grasses this year despite the wetter winter. I’ve been out for less than an hour when Brett comes outside, stands on stairs with two handfuls of differently sliced potatoes – for a potato salad because today a party of us will go up to the waterfall picnicking. This must be (no exaggeration) a 45-degree slope I have to scramble over, in my deeply chlorophyll-spattered-stained Nikes.

Brett has been complaining lately that her applicants to the Fiction program don’t seem to “read the materials” and so they phone with redundant questions. She’s always telling them, schoolmarmish, “If you’d read the material.” They are confused because they haven’t passed their eyes over a few well-crafted grammatically coherent sentences that explain what they’re wondering about. Brett’s theory is, people see everything on their phones these days. And a little bit of complexity doesn’t fit on the small screen.

But she went back inside, thinking of dice-sized potato chunks, and as I got back to “Whacking” the weeds – (this voracious wand is powered by electricity, and when I’ve been doing it for a while, when both the live tool and I are deep in the weedwhacking trance together, the voice of its slashing long burr-and-bristle starts to sound like Jimmy Cagney. Jimmy Cagney used to sometimes play a movie gangster and he would snarl You Dirty Rat and emphasize contempt with a taunting “Mnyeah, mnyeah.” It’s exactly what my weed-ripper does when I’m deep in the tall grasses and destroying them, making them lie down, jabbing at them, it says, “Mnyeah. . . Mnyeahh.”)

Anyway – as I went back into my work I started thinking about people’s comprehension of prose. Whether on an iPhone screen or a printed page. And about skimming in general. In general “skipping over stuff.” And I started thinking, Maybe people don’t exactly “read” anymore.

I’m thinking this pertains to readers of popular fiction, who are a vast market (and kind of a new market, too, last 30 yrs). People think they’re interested in “page turners,” – and yes, these people definitely do turn a lot of pages, consuming them at a high rate – but I wonder if they’re ever stopped in thought? Or if they even wanna be? If they think it’s bad to be? Maybe the kind of writing that’s out there these days warrants only a skim. Maybe a lot of these people pick a book that, they already know, is the kind of thing they like, and they run through it mostly confirming that, yes, it lived up to their expectations, while they never got outside their expectations into anything disorienting or worrisome or life-altering. It used to be, when you read, say, Ralph Ellison or Jane Austen, you were taking your life in your hands. No joke.

The same could be said, too, and just as much, of Salinger, Cheever, Hemingway, that to read them is to take your life into your hands. One wishes to go back to the days of small advances. The days of bookstores’ remoteness and cramped dark inaccessibility. Today they’re all out there on the mall sipping lattes while reading, and they expect reading to be a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Dashiell’s letter arrives from music school in faraway New Hampshire — it’s pencil-written, folded eight ways in a lump, then confided to a standard business-size envelope. He says everybody there is more talented than he, but he promises to impress everybody. Those were his words. The pathos of that assessment is too big to look at directly.

However, more recent news from him (coming thru’ longer conversations via the telephone hanging on the dorm-corridor wall) is that he’s doing much better, loving his classes, making friends.

* * * *

The Squaw Valley post office – where I’ve come on foot this early morn – is an empty linoleum space: the glassed-in community bulletin board, the columbarium of small numbered metal doors, mausoleum-style. From behind that wall of little compartments – as on every early morning in history (excepting Sundays and government holidays) – the sounds of the postmaster and co-workers can be heard. They’re sorting mail to the accompaniment of the radio, pop and rock, loud, from Reno, it’s their agreed-upon station. Those three guys and one woman have been faithfully doing this every dawn for the past couple of decades, now getting up into middle-age w/job security – today hearing Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young,” a melody surprisingly upbeat (not a dirge, not an anthem, not a requiem, considering it’s such a tragic sentiment!) actually very bouncy. And one USPS worker back there is singing along, the youngest of the four on the team.

* * * *

No work on any sort of writing today. The afternoon will be clearing brush on the slope again.

* * * *

August 3, 2016

Conferences are over. Summer’s end premature. All are gone from the Valley, only Lisa and Andrew to remain. Morning stacking firewood. Afternoon as “roustabout” breaking down the cheap bunting and flimsy sets that were the thunderous writers’ conference, trucking it all to Public Storage. Then tour Granlibakken to consider it as conference site; then, annual “expensive” dinner, for just us Top Brass.

* * * *

August 4, 2016

Last night at Wolfdale’s, I got the halibut and I watched Brett enjoying her scallops. Made me think of the sweetest scallops I ever ate, when, on Aptos beach 10 yrs ago, with wife-&-kids, I’d gotten a very bad diagnosis, by phone call. Didn’t mention it to anybody, but at seaside dinner, could observe the really delectable, delicious food on my plate with high-res photographic clarity. Did scallops ever taste any better than that?

* * * *

August 6, 2016

Getting wood in at the Annex. Big golden eagle who lives on the rock face and seldom comes this low, passes close, in among the Annex pines, at this level, checking me out.

How surprising, how savage and riot-grrrl, is Jane Austen’s youthful writing, her so-called juvenilia. Making notes on it for review.

Alone in Squaw. To PlumpJack alone, to splurge big-time on a bowl of fish soup, glass Tempranillo. The guy next to me in the banquette (sixty-ish, head shaved shiny-bald, collarless shirt and heavy gold necklace, lots of fussing over pricey bottle of wine and what to name his new boat) is interesting and has a story. A doctor, he was summoned by a Qatari prince for a diagnosis. First-class flight on British Airways to Heathrow, then, on airport gangway, sudden interception by armed posse in keffiyeh, diversion onto tarmac in the night, to landing-strip shed, where they are interrogated, then put on a Quatar Airways plane – the stewardesses are described as fuckable: do you want caviar? do you want vodka? – all the while, the running joke is, when will their heads will get lopped off. The doctor is identified on travel documents as “Catholic.” They get to Doha. Are swept by limousine to hotel. On arrival in hotel room, they get a phone call: come now, right this minute, the car’s out front, even though it’s 4:30 am, even tho’ they’re jet-lagged. – Mercedes entourage to palace. Palace is many rooms, basketball-court-sized, the rooms all enfilade, a thousand couches, everything gold, chandeliers. Finally in the palace’s inmost, centermost little closet, they meet the ailing prince. He’s about thirty, lying on an ordinary unkempt bed (not a golden-silk bed), watching a black-and-white television where black-and-white clips of lesbian midget mudwrestling are playing. (Diagnosis: sciatica.)

Doctor makes me sample his $170-bottle wine, extorts a lot of approbation from all, and I go home alone to my pleasure of my own well-earned fatigue in firewood-carrying, my uncomplicated Woodbridge “cabernet,” my Penguin Classic paperback of Jane Austen, which I’m savoring to its last footnote.

* * * *

August 9, 2016

Back home.

These meadows are so quiet. Evening-time in Nevada City. I’ve got a new pleasure, now in years when straw bales are such a staple furnishing of our lives: the color of the bales. The toasty warmth of them when the last light of day is on them. A bale is sitting right now on the open tailgate. (The delight to the eye is a little like the bone-deep satisfaction this organism feels when seeing firewood’s goldenness, fresh-cut and stacked, color of a crop storing calories.)

* * * *

August 26, 2016

Resolve to return to faithful reports to this diary.

Temperatures are trending cooler – in the seventies by next week.

Brett’s acquisitions: some pullets from Ridge Feed; for Barbara an armchair that will dump her forward when she wishes to stand up; from the Internet some old tough kilim fabric to be made into pillows for Squaw.

Diagnosis of solar-energy weakness: the panels in the array are defective, and I’ll have to get the manufacturer, BP, to honor their guarantee.

* * * *

August 28, 2016

Sunday. Beautiful day, I’m inside all morning with a short story, sick of it. Then I go outside at noon and, in the heat, there’s a small butterfly (common California Sister: little guy, wings barred tortoiseshell-and-ivory with tips of orange Kandy-Korn) fluttering among the tall spires of iris, whose pods of last spring look dead but are probably remembering some of the logic of life. And I can see, the most beautiful things happen without the slightest effort at all on my part. I don’t even have to be around.

“Cloverleaf” story to Oscar.

Mow front lawn, which has been knee-high all summer.

Tennis with Dash, then burritos at some new place.

* * * *

August 29, 2016

British Petroleum, who manufactured them, will honor their warranty for the solar panels that have grown weaker after ten years. But I must bear the cost of removing. So will personally remove.

Lots of evidence of thriving coyote population this year. Plenty of lusty chorusing in the nights, all around the old Ericson woods and beyond horse paddocks. Today, climbing Cement Hill to clear the irrigation weir, I came across more-than-usual of their droppings in the woods. One coyote seems to have ingested a songbird whole – undigested feather-and-bone compaction in the tar.

This morning early, Brett looked out into the south meadow and saw two large coyotes flanking a balking deer. The deer charged one of them. Then third coyote appeared, and Brett went running outdoors in the dew, barefoot, in nightgown, and took a stand and whinnied and windmilled her arms. The deer went bounding away (boink, boink, boink, boink) into the east woods. The three coyotes looked at Brett pissed-off and turned and cantered into the south woods, into the blackberry paths that lead down to ravines.

Late afternoon, I go alone, rocky road, lifting dust, in pickup down to the river. My favorite beach is unchanged by rough winters, and I spend a couple of hours in favorite old repetitious activity, climbing upstream wrestling the current, then letting go and flowing down over smooth rocks. Over and over again.

* * * *

August 31, 2016

Threepenny Review takes the Jane Austen essay happily.

For some days now, I’ve been back on “Immanence” trying to disestablish any “suspense” structure – especially in the front end, taking care to reduce readers’ expectations of intrigue – and replacing it with the promises of metaphysics solely.

I have to pick up Dash early at school, so he can come home and take the online BYU test, and I’m parked outside the rural-highschool attendance office. Three student-age kids – not truant but for some reason at large in the parking lot, nonchalantly – are headed somewhere: a boy and two girls. They notice something in the lawn and, using a stick because it’s icky, they snag it and pick it up. Whip it around. Flip it off into the hedgerow. They move on, but the boy takes out his iPhone and leans over for a close-up of it where it stuck – then he catches up with the shambling-away girls. I can tell from here what it is, it’s underwear, a lacy black thong with about as much fabric as a slingshot.

* * * *

September 1, 2016

More on “Immanence,” hitting no bumps.

N.B.: September First, and the Italian prunes behind the winter woodpile are exactly right. The bear who used to steal them all has apparently moved on or died. In a couple of hours I get unbelievably heaped heavy basketfuls, for winter’s sauces.

Expecting (today) delivery by FedEx. So my trip to Squaw this weekend will be productive.

Beef short ribs braise 3 hrs in prune juice. Meanwhile I, during the hour of Dashiell’s math tutor appointment, cool my heels sitting at a curbside table in a mall, drinking p. grigio and reading Nabokov’s essay on Mansfield Park. Nabokov is a bit of an ass.

Because life will very soon get grittier again, I’m making the most of this well-managed hour.

* * * *

September 2, 2016

To Squaw, for Labor Day weekend, the pickup loaded with French-draw table, pillows, reconditioned blinds. The lumber for deck-enclosure repairs will be at lumber yard today only.

* * * *

September 5, 2016

Labor Day. Burnett’s birthday party first, then Susan’s lakeshore party. These are all great people. At a table full of Republicans, I have to explain how it is that folks aren’t “required” to get solar electricity, because they’ve got a right, as Americans in a free-market economy, to get their power from coal if that’s how they prefer it. Keep those Kentucky men underground if they like. Keep the skies dirty, the coral reefs dying. It’s a free country. And why Floridians opposing “radical climate-change agenda” will, some day soon, feel themselves entitled to sue for government financial disaster-relief aid.

On a brighter note: Burnett, at his 93rd birthday party, brings out the old mayor-of-Sacramento personality and gives a long birthday speech about everything we owe to the labor movement (it being Labor Day), and his friend (88 yrs old) starts singing “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night/Alive as you and me.”

Tonight, now, all are gone. Quiet. I’m the last of the tribe in Squaw, alone in the Annex with my vices. I’ve finished the windows in the Annex – and today and yesterday reframed the privacy wall around the west deck of the upper house, a flimsy wall that has gone all wonky from wintertime glacial movement of snow-load: all the posts are listing about six degrees off-vertical. So tomorrow I’ll get some rope and, anchoring to a big pine with a come-along ratchet, pull the whole structure back up to plumb, then put some two-by-six diagonals in the structure that Oakley never thought to provide. I frequently think of Oakley in these autumn days when I’m patching up these houses, his slapdash patch-up carpentry.

Also, stain the new wood. Misc. other things.

* * * *

September 6, 2016

Squaw. Woke early and, avoiding laptop, starting with coffee,went to work, total cleanup, replacing faulty light switch in stairwell, shutting down and draining Annex swamp cooler, binding up the unraveling ends of the Annex blinds (which required unaccustomed distaff patience and dexterity), then going up in the sun and starting work on the upper-house Wedding Deck. Found some stout rope and rigged up two guys (anchoring them to pine by the road); improvised turnbuckles with broomsticks; and it took many tightenings over the day (I’m reminded of an orthodontist periodically wringing braces tighter) to suck the whole heavy structure up plumb. Which it is, now. Tomorrow, lag screws in the 2-by-6 diagonal brace I’ve fitted into place. Locking it plumb. (This deck is all Oakley’s old carpentry, and – even 25 yrs after – I sense myself to be in an ongoing conversation with him. – He drove in the nail I’m now pulling, as insufficient. That is a conversation.)

Cabinet latch in upper-house pantry.

(Evening. Listened to the CD of Dash’s concert piece, piano-cello-bells, based on Jerald’s painting in the Crocker, and it’s just wonderful. More stirring than I’d remembered.)

* * * *

Little “ineffability” moment this afternoon. Sitting in chair in the upper-house doorway, taking a break, looking out over the valley and across to far peaks, big forested bowls of air between here and Squaw Peak, between here and Granite Chief, ample distances in these mountains, I think somehow, I am the only thing in this entire scene that isn’t present.

Does this mean “Everything else is present. Only the conscious being is absent”?

I haven’t any idea what it means – neither semantically nor referentially – but it’s a distinct enough sensation to seem worth recording.

* * * *

September 7, 2016

Up at four. In Annex, while the dishwasher quietly grinds, I read Nabokov on Dickens’s Bleak House. Wonderful. The critic’s perpetually innocent delight/wonder, seeing a fellow-enthusiast take his “genius” turns, swingin’ on a star. Then, at daylight, unbind the Wedding Deck from its taut harness to the pine tree: My diagonal brace is staunch. The whole structure doesn’t plunge back downhill, doesn’t even creak, doesn’t even tick. (Eight big six-inch lag screws secure the ends.) Finish trim over vertical panels. Hammer in last nail. Close up both houses.

Home to Nevada City, truck piled high.

* * * *

September 11, 2016

Sunday morning. Out in the meadows’ dark, the pulse of Rainbird sprinklers’ tireless ejaculations obviously must have persisted crazily all the while I slept, as evidenced by the drenched condition of sod in the moonlight.

A colonizing new species of grass this year, when unmowed, grows hip-high by end of summer.

Today at last, after delays, to begin removing solar panels from garage roof and testing voltage. Dash and his friend Finn to help. The pickup is parked alongside under the eave, ladders founded in its bed.

Prompting note to Paris Review.

These few days going over “Immanence.”

Tonight, the last of the Nico’s left-behind chorizo flavored cod with Panko; then last night Brussels sprouts; tonight a tortilla broth.

* * * *

Entire operation of solar panel removal goes beautifully. The two 16-yr-old boys get a pay raise they’re so competent, behaving like men, up against the sky at roof-peak – agile, courteous, careful, above all competent. It’s all done within a few hours, 24 heavy panels stacked ’thwart the garden gate. The plan for a stingy tortilla broth is dismissed and instead smoke two trout; pasta of fresh tomatoes. Then reading more of Nabokov (on Flaubert). A happy Sunday altogether including even music. (If lacking in any of my own work.)

* * * *

On the creative writing business:

To admire the labors of the saints is good; to emulate them wins salvation; but to wish suddenly to imitate their life in every point is unreasonable and impossible.

– St. John Climachus, 6th C.

The “You-Have-To-Be-Crazy” part.

* * * *

September 13, 2016

Nice first stab at winter. A little light, steady rain last night on tin roof outside open, screened window. NOAA has snow on the high elevations above the passes. Today’s max temperature here will be in the sixties.

Measuring voltage and amperage on the solar panels. Of 24, seven have failed. My believe is, this entitles me to a total-replacement refund from BP, as the product has a forty-year warrantee.

* * * *

During Dashiell’s 5-to-6 hour at the tutor, I kill time again (same as last week) at the curbside table of a strip-mall restaurant with glass of white wine and book. Behind me along the sidewalk, a 5-yr-old girl is crouching behind a trash can, hiding, folding herself very small against its foot. At last, of the two women who have been loading a minivan, the young pretty one comes to find the girl, and soon there’s lots of secret weeping going on. The woman kneeling. The girl won’t come out of her crouch, won’t come away from the cylindrical cement wall of the garbage receptacle, won’t be consoled. For many minutes, while quietly talking to her, the woman lets her hand stroke and stroke the upper arm of the little girl. Whatever has gone wrong, it won’t ever be fixed, it’s something that can’t be fixed, it’s not the usual thing.

After they’ve all gone, I turn more fully and I can see the storefront there is the “Foster Family Center of Nevada County” – with, inside, lots of plush Teddy bears sitting up in nursery rockers, all different sizes. The office is closed, it’s past five, nobody is in there where, after hours, bears with out-of-touch-with-reality smiles preside. When the little girl was loaded into the car seat of the minivan, she was still crying. The young woman stayed on the sidewalk watching the closed car travel through the parking lot and get out on the street. The thing that little girl knows – which she’s certain of – is that what’s wrong can’t be fixed, and that moreover, it’s something wrong with herself. That’s the problem. It’s always the heart of the problem.

* * * *

September 14, 2016

No writing today. Have to wrap up the Carlotta plot-thread better, and have to prepare a prior justification for the John/Thalia resolution.

So I get up early and, like a bum, play slide guitar in the kitchen during the dawn hours.

More fully sever root of big fir beside house. A good bit of digging necessary.

First contact with BP, inquiring how to fill out claim form. This will be interesting.

Oil change for Brett’s car.

Reading at Grass Valley bookstore, drinks after at McGee’s.

(Topic: my increasing disrespect for Flaubert. Reading Nabokov’s praise of him, his conformity to the Flaubert cult, I get the more ticked off. Not only is the characterization merely mean, the vaunted prose is bad.)

* * * *

September 16, 2016

Afternoon: unexpected visit from solar technician, who is very generous with his own time. Has brought a meter to measure the “irradiance” of incident sunlight, which measurement turns out to be a requirement of BP. It turns out, when the panels are all retested, there seem to be 16 failures, out of a total of 24. Which is a high failure rate.

Much of the morning was lost to entering data about my failed solar panels (voltage, amperage, irradiance, temperature, corresponding #s of documentary photographs), all on the cramped little grid of a “spreadsheet.”

Park the truck in town on Broad Street, the pickup bed piled high with excellent oak logs. Needing coins for parking meter, I buy a fancy probiotic drink in storefront (lime, coconut, aloe), and a beautiful golden-haired woman wearing a sleeveless cavewoman dress made out of thinnest chamois-leather slides up alongside me on the sidewalk, saying, “That’s only the best-tasting drink the world. What day is your birthday?”

After I tell her, I’m informed that I’m a water sign, as well a snake sign. Also a wizard. It turns out I share this distinction of nativity with Oprah Winfrey and a living Hindu saint named Ammachi. Whom I’d never heard of. – We actually chat for a while, she and I, in front of the coffee shop I intend to enter. Suddenly she looks over my shoulder seeing into coffee shop window, with delight, “Hey, it’s my son. That’s my son.” A skinny teenager is in there, playing on his phone, aware of his mother, but unlikely to look up and acknowledge her. She boasts a little about him, how he was raised without any contamination by formal education. She’ll go in and join him at his table, her effusive warmth to be met with his total nonchalant indifference. She has sat down at his table, but he never even lifts his eyes from his computer screen. Meanwhile I’m across the room in armchair with cappuccino, googling “Ammachi” on my own iPhone. Ammachi does exist, a lovely plump charismatic woman with wonderful smile, a vermillion bindi dot between her eyebrows.

* * * *

September 22, 2016

Short cold snap. Temps will top out in the low 60s. More dusting of snow on the high passes.

Feeling unwell, kinda paralyzed on my left side with sharp cartilage pain in shoulder, hip-joint and knee, I soak myself every day in contemplation of a river-canyon book, or a retirement-home book, or some recombinant mash-up. (Recombinant mash-ups: “A salad of marshmallows and mushrooms”: that was my old metaphor for such easy silliness.) With cult of clitoridectomy and twenty-something slackers’ pessimistic fatalism, “comic-grotesque” seems to be the congealing tone.

* * * *

Rain. My intention was to go out and turn under the cover crop in the raised bed – prep for asparagus to come, midwinter. But first thunder over northern ridges, then rain. So I’m indoors philosophizing here on this luminous screen-page instead. About the following:

That I live on Indians’ land is achingly clear to me every day. The granite slabs in my woods and at the foot of my sunny meadow (these boulders surface like breaching whales) have anciently been shallow-ground to make mortars, bored by Nisenan squaws to pound a mash of acorn meal. Maybe two hundred years ago? Maybe even four hundred? This very meadow, I like to think, was where the Nisenan partied annually, and where, as party prep, the girls and women spent mornings or afternoons moliendo, trabajando, platicando in the oak shade.

Now I’m long aware of the motto “Ownership is Theft.” And I know that the motto, popularly, applies just about perfectly to the relations between Native Americans and arriving Europeans. Whenever I walk here, I think of it. I think of who walked here before me. But today when the first drops were starting to make pattering on the madrone leaves, I found myself, devil’s-advocate-fashion, admitting a kinder view, also, of the arriving colonists.

First of all, the European arrivistes were encountering vast tracts of land that were governed differently. Or governed mysteriously. Tribes were mostly unconfederated, with constantly shifting boundaries (…I’m talking about the land “ownership” concept here). It might be considered a kind of “crime” — or theft — if a European man took a stand on a piece of dirt saying he had the exclusive use of it, and drawing a line at some middle-distance in the dirt (how absurd, too!), pointing at the line and saying that the Native would be just fine so long as he stayed on the other side of the line.

But at its heart, the institution of “ownership” of land isn’t about grandiosity or even, necessarily, aggression. At its heart it’s about responsibility. In practice, it’s about stewardship. Here on these acres I myself happen to be doing not much. As an asset to society, it’s kind of a waste. I’ve been only raising two boys, cultivating some food for my own use, taking care of a very old helpless lady. Those are creative uses, I suppose. Plus, as a creative use, we do provide premises for the Community of Writers office. Others could put the land to some fuller use, and when the time comes that I alienate myself from the place (“sell” it), some other owner might put it into potatoes or vineyards or do some more serious truck farming, or who knows, maybe build a motel. Land has its creative uses. Land allows work.

And to get creative work done – or getting anything done – some “stability” is required. Continuity of possession is a good basis. The owner can’t be constantly at risk of having a neighbor come through the woods to announce that, now, the place is gonna be a go-cart racetrack or a mink farm or a Buddhist monastery. (Or whatever he happens to want.) Or of having a trespasser build a house for himself in this meadow. If some trespasser would like to do that, he of course can, but only after a long, conventional process of negotiation and mutual settlement.

In other words, the “ownership” institution, at its heart, is about the bourgeois stability that supports creative work. It’s about Peace, Love, and Understanding, like everything else in bourgeois conventional society, ideally. The Peace-Love-and-Understanding trinity is the foundation of much more than the hippies liked to pretend. Suburbia is the apotheosis of Peace, Love, and Understanding. (They wouldn’t have said so at Woodstock.)

None of this is supposed to suggest that the Natives haven’t been displaced unfairly. It’s only to hope, rather, that it isn’t fully “evil” to create a line and observe it, where once people crossed freely to and fro.

* * * *

September 25, 2016

Sunday. Have been working happily in the forest trailer all this month.

After work, with chainsaw cut entire load of oak into lengths for firewood, working below cottage on the tailgate of pickup, east meadow.

Got a start turning over the cover crop by spade.

Dash has his drivers license now, and takes the Toyota out in shy, short trips: to coffee shop and back.

* * * *

October 1, 2016

No writing today. Slept in surprisingly late, slept maybe ten hrs total, which I take as a good sign (i.e., of the repose in my bosom of the freshly redacted “Immanence”).

Sunny, cool. Rains to come in tomorrow.

It’s Saturday, Brett barefoot in nightgown. Bring in baskets of winter squash. Also some summer squash is still producing. A big yellow spherical pumpkin, looking right now more like a melon, shows first blush of orange, a pumpkin-color aureole around the button on its butt.

First early-pears harvest. The truck bed serves as my ladder.

Repair oven-door spring, another trip to B&C for aviation cable and pinch-clips.

Brett to Celtic Festival with her friends.

* * * *

And the garden gate! After all these years at last it’s broken. So it is. An old familiar Zen metaphor turns up as the real thing in a man’s life, in a literal garden.

* * * *

October 2, 2016

Rain is promised. Satellite imagery, animated, shows a big guillotine-blade of overcast arriving from Pacific Northwest, due here by noon, though now the sky is summer-blue.

Snow-on-passes accumulation to be two inches, which would mean twice that on summits and snow fields.

Both swamp coolers drained. Big-house cooler tarped. (Up there on that ladder, I find wind-damage to west verandah roof. Nothing urgent, but something to be handled.)

Still, for a second day, no thinking about “Immanence.”

Lunch with Burnett and Mimi in town.

I’d purchased all the victuals for dinner here with Josh Weil and family, but it must be canceled, as their baby has an irritable cold.

* * * *

October 3, 2016

Spent much of the day actually physically aching in a nationwide kind of way, here pacing my own meadows, I’ve actually got “the blues” – about the low quality of public discourse, which has come along with this year’s awful presidential campaign, it’s all over the media, resurgence of racist assumptions, a new license for the lid to be lifted on all the gremlins and Orcs who ordinarily don’t disport themselves in public, anti-Islam speech, insults to the people who make our beds and bend over all day picking our lettuce, even anti-Semitic hints, all as if, whenever truculence and impoliteness come out of their little holding pen, they “go on a spree” – thuggish talk from exalted podiums and the Mussolini frown and strut of one of the presidential candidates. And how this contaminates even me up here in my isolation where I’d liked to think animals’ manure is the most dangerous contact.

* * * *

Blessings-Counting: Every now and then, over the years, Brett has told me I ought to get work as a voice in radio or TV. She’s not kidding. An announcer or something. She thinks my speaking voice is great.

This is absurd, of course. But how lucky can you be? I live in a place where Brett thinks such a thing.

It’s not the only example. If I’d been given this address thirty years ago, and been told, “Go there. Go see a place where, some day, people will be prejudiced in your favor,” I certainly wouldn’t have believed it, the place’s peace and tranquility and liberty.

* * * *

October 6, 2016

Bad development. My supplier of biodiesel has been shut down. So I’ll be filling up at the Chevron station guiltily.

This while my solar-power array is disabled on account of its manufacturing defects.

So altogether, for an indefinite period, I won’t be able to, like King Canute, keep the tide from rising personally and single-handedly. (In Florida now, where salt water is rising up through limestone underfoot into people’s gardens, the situation is this: the state Governor forbids the words “climate change” to be spoken in the hallway or offices, or to be written on any paper; while the mayor of Miami has the official policy of recommending migration: “Get out of Miami before it floods. If you’re young and have your life ahead of you, start someplace else. Head for high ground. If you’re older, well, maybe you could enter into a thirty-year mortgage. Whatever you do, consider your time frame.”

Barbara at 93, mostly chair-bound. How resilient is the organism, tired-o’-livin’, ‘fraid-o-dyin’, at this point, the main erosion, the biggest weight for her to carry, isn’t pain or sickness, it’s despair. Pain and sickness are almost bracing, by comparison. They’re a nice distractions from the despair. Despair alone (I’ve experienced this) is tiring as if it were physical labor, exhausting, bodily, it drains calories. Yet she keeps on surviving the heaviest-possible, most crushing-possible hopelessness. Patience, suspense. Tightrope-walk.

* * * *

October 11, 2016

One o’clock in the afternoon. I see through the kitchen French doors, Pabby is crossing the lawn headed for the little iron gate to Barbara’s domain. (Her regular stint, a bit of reading-aloud, and maybe TV-watching, on Tuesdays a so-called “spa” including a blow-dry, nap-time.) Carrying supplies, she stops under the mulberry and looks out at the meadow – pauses for a good half-minute! a full minute! – then moves on, her head down, where nowadays a path is being worn in the grass, through that gate.

She’s a country woman and, looking out over the meadow, could have been making a sort of practical appraisal, seeing something that needs doing; or she might have just been admiring. October light on the meadow, pines glittering. Whatever, the ability to pause for a minute, to stand still, is distinguishing to not-just-everybody. You have to be either tired or wise.

* * * *

After “Immanence,” pick pears, a third day of it.

Offer comes from BPSolar, compensation for defective panels.

Clean garage, then cruise the Goodwill stores of the county looking for somebody who will accept the gift of an Exer-Cycle.

* * * *

October 12, 2016

Done with another pass. I keep working to restore conventional plot-and-character music to the story. Which goes against the grain of the book, because this shuffled-episode manner of narration depends on a sidelining of plot.

Plan is: tomorrow to take another vacation from work.

Have to get ready for the SF reading, find a suitable text.

Big rain coming in. Outdoor kindling box cleaned up.

(More talk with lawyers, about BP Solar settlement.)

A summer’s worth of littered-around agricultural paraphernalia.

Poultry premises roofed with fresh-purchased corrugated metal. The chickens’ summer roof, the rather tropical bamboo, has been rolled up and stowed in potting shed.

Hearing unaccustomed northerly ridges’ trees rustle, seeing the mists starting to blanch the blue southwest (all the cubic miles of atmosphere above the Sacramento Valley), I always think of my ranger friend who (we were hiking up the Yuba canyon and it was November, and I’d only lived here a few months then) took such pleasure in looking downriver, where the notch opens up to the great valley, and seeing the air between here and the Pacific thickening and whitening, took such satisfaction in the sight, saying, “Now that’s the typical Alaska system coming in.”

* * * *

October 14, 2016

Good strong rain comes in in the night. Early morning, the new corrugated-metal roof over chicken premises requires lots of leak remediation, early in AM.

Brett observes there’s a particular hen – a Barred Plymouth Rock – who gets pecked a lot by the other girls (presently the Identified Victim), and her method of saving herself is just to drop off the roost and into the manure-hammock below. It’s another instance of poultry society and psychology providing a correlative of human. Her gambit is to convey: “Don’t peck at me, I’m down here in the manure. I’m not a competitor.”

In SF, I’ll be walking past degraded homeless folk playing the same trick.

“Proposition Q” on this season’s SF election ballot would have all the tents of homeless folk hosed off the sidewalks. I come across a remark of Abraham Heschel’s:

“Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself. It is a silent justification affording evil acceptability in society.”

* * * *

To SF, in the pickup, not the jalopy. Heavy rain.

Northern California seems, increasingly, to be a traffic jam. There’s really been an epochal development in the overpopulation of the state, and a clever traveler has to weave around its web at all hours.

Dinner at “Curry Leaf” on Columbus with Jason Roberts, then we go to a place he knows called Sweetie’s Art Bar and drink Stormy Nights – ginger beer and rum – we the two in the place who toast E Bulwer Lytton.

* * * *

October 15, 2016

Wake in SF alone. Via telecommute, work on grant application (deadline is today). Trip up through Chinatown, for the purchase of a toothbrush (I’d forgotten to pack one) and a year’s supply of sturdy clothes.

Andrew arrives from Oakland airport and takes BART to town, walks up hill. Lunch at “The House” on Grant, which is excellent. Then visit to the shivah at Specs bar, vigil for Specs himself. Wonderful food laid out, the best smoked salmon I’ve ever had: so, typically, it’s food to make everybody think, “He would have loved this.”

Reading at five o’clock, in some fashionable Mission saloon.

* * * *

October 16, 2016

Reading went well, in an upstairs bar – too much racket from restaurant below.

Then dinner at a long table at Puerto Allegre. Followed by a chase up and down the streets of the Mission with Andrew Tonkovich and Jason Roberts, looking for the oil painting that was the trophy awarded as Barbary Coast prize. We connect with the painting itself at The Vestry (big dark loud party), and with my posse we carry it off in the rain.

* * * *

A day alone in North Beach, idle and sad. City Lights basement.

Specs Simmons’s shivah is still going on, so I stop by there. In the rug store next to Live Worms, a tabla player and a harmonium player are whiling away the afternoon playing excellent (excellent!) qawwali music. These are two brothers, middle-aged, virtuosi, from Islamabad, been playing together all their lives. The park bench in Washington Square. A very young amputee in a wheelchair goes past with great scornful dignity. Later he’s sitting alone talking to himself.

Dinner with Nico and Ola.

* * * *

October 18, 2016

What can I be so unhappy about? Well, as I get older, I spend more and more time outside my own skin (as on the whole youngsters do live pretty happily inside their own skin). And when you get outside your own skin, what is there? There’s air (nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide), there’s light and sound, all those vibes. And when you start being specific, there’s love and beauty. But also there’s lots more, and it catches your eye, there’s overpopulation of the planet, there’s irreversible climate change, social injustice that is axiomatic to the whole economy, racism, suspicion, how doomed are the ocean’s colorful coral reefs. Et cetera. All this outside my immediate concerns.

Along Divisidero, where I used to frolic in pre-marriage days with any amount of pocket money, the sidewalks now host rows of homeless folks’ tents, North Face or Coleman pop-ups, semi-permanently installed, with shopping carts parked outside. It amounts to a relentless vise, this exponential resource depletion. (Which everybody saw coming, way back in ’72, including corporate strategists.)

A remark of Abraham Heschel: “The opposite of ‘good’ isn’t ‘evil’; the opposite of good is indifference.”

* * * *

A day for getting results. Wrote an Op-Ed piece and sent it to the Times. Signed off on a commitment to receiving a few thousand bucks’ compensation from BP Solar.

Dash and his friends want to go to Squaw tonight, so I’ll go with them and handle some things up there.

* * * *

October 20, 2016

Back up in Squaw. Snow on granite: — it’s the “timelessness” metaphor. It heaves up in my windshield, as usual, above my steering wheel, and I actually get a tear in the eye for something that is truly near to unchanging. For even in extreme cases (e.g., even without forests, without vertebrate life, etc.), Granite Chief and Squaw Peak will be there still, just as I see them now, just as will Orion and Scorpio and the Big Dipper and the Pleiades, all my faves.

* * * *

Reading Paul Harding early in the morning. In Mr. Harding’s risky but successful sentence structures I think I catch a fleeting glimpse of “the flashy tail feathers of the bird courage.”

Wasted day yesterday, invested “all-in” in my own incompetence. I had a plan to shore up the wedding-deck foundation – purchased some pressure-treated fir, some construction stakes, a half-yard of crushed rock – and then discovered the hill is solid granite. No soil. The construction stakes, with help from sledge hammer, won’t penetrate more than a half-inch (into what had looked like dirt). Any “soil-retention” I might attempt would wash away in a single winter.

For a while then, with an ill-fated plan of making a dry-stack wall instead, I’m (Ecclesiastically) dragging together heavy stones. On the NPR radio while I work deeper into my incompetence, the story is about the prison system, explaining it’s as expensive to keep a prisoner on Death Row for a year as it would have been to send him to an Ivy League school for a year. I’m thinking, “Yup.”

* * * *

October 21, 2016

This dog we have here in this house. His name is Felix, “rescue dog,” and every night, from his position in the corner, he’s watchful for the levitation of dinner plates from the table. He has learned that, for his good manners, he deserves to lap up the gravy, or the crumbs, when the plates are set down on the floor for him. When he first got here, he flinched and snarled at anyone who would reach out to pet him – having spent his puppy year on the streets of Salinas, California, dining on garbage, evading the dogcatcher. Nowadays he doesn’t flinch anymore. His tail now is mostly always set straight-up like a plume. I have a mental habit of comparing my lot in life to beasts’ – all the other beasts in Creation – I guess it’s a habit of “empathy” but also a form of moral assessment. Thinking of beasts’ highly evolved ethics, courtesy, sociality, predation, etc. And I feel better about things generally when I contemplate this dog Felix’s conversion, over two years. Now he has expectations. And he has entitlements. Now he’s a good dog and he knows it. He even thinks he has a certain few justified expectations. He once didn’t think he was a good dog. Back in Salinas, he must have been assured he was a very bad dog, on the evidence. How does he now know he’s s good dog? The after-dinner treats keep coming. There’s the warrant for thinking so. He must be a good dog. He must be an instance of goodness.

* * * *

October 22, 2016

Rigmarole. Recording serial numbers for all 24 BP Solar pv panels. Packaging up all the data for their claims dept and emailing it off.

Better patching, on the roof of the hens’ enclosure, where the 12-foot lengths of corrugated won’t extend over the 12-foot-6-inch surface.

It’s time to get storm windows on upper house, but sharp wind comes up, along with rain – (in a blast of sudden wind, a fellow doesn’t want to be caught hoisting a 3’x5’ heavy rectangle, standing on a ladder rung) – So I’ve only gotten one up before I have to come back down ladder.

* * * *

October 26, 2016

On a bad day, it’s announced that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has exceeded 400 parts per million. “350.org” was what Bill McKibben optimistically named his climate-crusading organization. 350ppm seemed, then, a “line in the sand” that could be confidently drawn, never to be exceeded.

In our little insignificant household here, I actually imagine such a dinner-table scene. It would be aimed at embarrassing those who leave lamps or heaters running (tho’ it’s too comical, too cruel):

DASH

Dad, you’ve left the water running at the kitchen sink.

ME

Oh, well, I’ll just leave it. Let it run. Somebody else will want a drink of water soon enough.

All the while, I know how futile — how eccentric — is my house in the remote west. I know most normal people live with the lights opulently burning all over the house, the HVAC always blasting, winter and summer – the point being to sever themselves from their natural environment. I remember as a child in Chicago sitting down at a dining room table, a winter’s eve, while every light was blazing on every empty floor of the house. The odd thing about the memory is, I bring it back as a sad cold feeling, having all that empty brightness at my back.

Insomnia: reading Sharon’s wonderful new book of “Odes.” Her best ever, so I feel. And I’ve gone back to Henry Greene, one I’d never read, “Blindness.”

Tonight, Dashiell’s choral concert.

*

— Choral concert was great.

* * * *

October 28, 2016

Yesterday sitting behind the Chevron station on a retaining wall I put the following twos together, making a four:

I’ve believed (or anyway I’ve announced) for years that “consciousness” is a congregant phenomenon. That is, neurologists and metaphysicians will look in vain for “the ghost in the machine” if they’re contemplating a single brain, watching for thoughts and feelings in the tissues (the electrochemical pulses) of just one human organism. This because “consciousness” exists not inside a single bag of skin, my consciousness exists only exterior to myself, in the languages of the world that have poured into me, in every murmur of my mother when I was an infant (and by extension in her mothers’ and great-great-grandmothers’ utterances), in all culture, in every magazine article I ever read (and in every magazine article my acquaintances, too, read and then mentioned to me), in all the libraries of the world. That’s where my own mind abides: outside myself. (Also there, abides the grammar which is the circuitry of logic. By which I evaluate and relate objects of knowledge.) Consciousness (my own mind) is not something I own personally. My mind it’s something I borrow – participate in – swim through.

So, behind the Chevron sitting in the rain, I make the following conflation of neuroscience with the dharma: that this congregant “consciousness” is the medium of the so-called “reincarnation” that has so often troubled me in Asian doctrine. (The principle is called “dependent arising” in Indian philosophy.) And when the deep-meditating arhat sits very still and hushes the nattering swarm of “language” and “ideas,” bringing on the silence, he’s putting to rest that linguistic, social, congregant phenomenon that is consciousness.

* * * *

October 30, 2016

Rain. Sunday AM

Done with work in trailer by ten AM, an early quitting time for me.

Our pears are popular. B. & E. Preston (plus kids) pick up a bag; then J. Weil (plus kid) stops by to pick up a bag.

Board meeting in Sacramento, followed by a matinee Kill Mockingbird. Dash comes along.

It’s sunny in the Sacramento Valley. And sunny in the sleepy small town that is California’s capital. But over Donner Pass and Tioga Pass, heavy snow closes traffic in both directions. As we drive back up into the Sierra, the wall of black churning on the slope is like a movie special-effect.

* * * *

November 1, 2016

Afternoon, to Marysville to visit Western Farm Worker’s Alliance. Low sun on fallow fields. While I’m in their offices: Buenas dias senorita Erika. Tenemos una familia. Necessitan comida. (Led by “the new priest” from down the street, Father Brown, the mom and dad are under twenty, movie-star-beautiful, with nina of about four – all three dressed in the very newest best cheap clothes. Si. Tienen hambre. The only one who isn’t shy is the little girl, who makes their way for them in North America.)

Stop by Sierra Solar, to try to quicken their response.

* * * *

November 2, 2016

Rotted gatepost in the garden gate.

Pulling out all summer’s garden – (this has been going on all week, mostly under Brett’s muddy-gloved hand).

It’s just Dash and I for dinner, as Brett has gone to an arty event in Sac and Barbara is with her hired friend.

(Late, I’m alone reading Edith Pearlman, all her intractable race issues – the unredeemability of the unredeemed – I have to use Google to remind myself exactly what Purim commemorates, and on the tiny screen of my phone, I’m lost in the lengthy Wikipedia article: I’d always considered Purim a fun little raucous commemoration of Esther’s outsmarting the king and saving the Jews from Haman; I hadn’t really registered that Haman’s plan was, Goering-like, to exterminate all the Jews in the entire empire (to which all Jews’ response is to enter into penitence, prayer, fasting), and then in the end, that the Jews’ victory’s reward is in their killing 75,000 of their enemies throughout Persia. And then my phone utters a klink-klonk sound and a panel drops down informing me: “The 108-yr curse is broken. The lovable loser Cubs beat Cleveland by 1 run in Tenth Inning.” Never, since boyhood, followed baseball much, but still, just as I’ve read it, the panel that interrupted me slides away again and tears have come stand freely in my eyes, as if I hadn’t had a reason for happiness myself for 108 years, or as if I cared about baseball.)

* * * *

November 4, 2016

No work.

Trip to town: bank, wine, groceries, doctor appointment.

Trying to think about something on the topic of “Plato” that Wendy has asked for for the Threepenny.

Troy and Heather are to drive down for dinner, bringing pot of curry.

Smoke two trout w/sage and make raita.

Get a little progress on the broken gatepost, cutting post to size but lacking copper preservative.

Grocery Outlet was always the lowest-class place in town to shop, and it’s where I have always, also, shopped. (Liz: “I may like to think I’m grubby because I get to town only every week or so; some of the people who turn up in Grocery Outlet haven’t been to town in generations”) – but the place seems to be evolving. I’m picking bargains off the wine shelves, and the woman near me has been asking the wine stocker about reds – she particularly likes a Tempranillo – and she accepts a recommendation on a different one, a Spanish Rioja. Then the Wine Guy points out a Carmenere she’ll like. Good, she’s been looking for a Carmenere. He adds, “It’s a great bargain, and it’s a pretty accurate Carmenere.”

Barbara went wandering yesterday and took a spill. Seems to have been a gentle, slo-mo spill. But today she’s experiencing the same back pain that tormented her last month.

* * * *

November 6, 2016

The election is two days away, and it’s painful to listen to the discourse. Toqueville’s worst predictions may be fulfilled. Brett and I are out in the garden all day. I’m re-amending the already-amended soil, then we plant (commercial starts) arugula, lettuce, kale, chard, cabbage, parsley. All day sunny and misty and mild. Il faut cultiver son jardin.

Morning, I actually get back to “All Things,” which I love. Then a better draft of the Squaw fundraising letter. Then finish the garden gatepost: old heavy four-by-six, which yesterday I painted with copper naphthenate, sunk three feet in ground. Then, very cleverly, capped with old tin, as rain-protection.

Curry with yams.

* * * *

November 9, 2016

In a strange election, an unwise man is put in the presidency. Famously unwise, famously violent. At all hours of the night, I’m out watching the stars, which are particularly clear and close and beautiful tonight. Set up wicker chair in meadow, coffee, sky-map app on phone. A few shooting stars streak by, but there’s nothing to wish for. The following (from 7th C. Japan) is in my mind:

Middle of night, email Joy to ask that “The Assistant” be withdrawn from consideration anywhere.

* * * *

November 12, 2016

Party last night w/ Malsams & Seelys, Billheimer, et alia.

Today, Saturday, winter gardening. A full yard commercial soil for the long bed. Soil amendment elsewhere.

Very happy with new scraped-clean “All Things.” From all depictions of Heaven, I’m taking out complexity and gingerbread-curlicues – simplifying Heaven – rendering Heaven as ruthless as, in fact, it is.

The only way to get a full yard of soil from the truck bed into the garden is via repetitious wheelbarrow loads.

Evening, Dash and his friends to Sacramento for Jerald Silva’s opening reception. So he misses out on the big greasy aromatic pork roast.

* * * *

This nice thing from William Blake, quoted in R’s post-election-politics article in The Guardian: “He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars … General good is the plea of the scoundrel.”

* * * *

November 13, 2016

Sunday.

So-called supermoon large in the sky, at perigee 29,000 miles closer to earth than usual. Lights up the meadow blue. Silence in woods all ’round, as if all creatures stunned/mesmerized, breathing shallow.

Transplant all the old asparagus, unsure I haven’t done violence to the roots.

* * * *

November 14, 2016

Dash’s fender-bender: he rear-ends somebody at a parking-lot entrance.

Another visit from a solar engineer, for I’m taking bids to have these failed panels replaced.

* * * *

November 15, 2016

Small good rain. — One marks these things because it looks like the far West might be coming out of its drought.

Work on “All Things” reaches the midpoint, the Old Dispensation, where sketching Heaven more mechanically paint-by-numbers in its cruelty, all seems to go well. The New Dispensation is a whole other thing, where tone-clash problems may persist.

Also, what’s at stake in the story changes there, from adultery to eschatology: reader puts book down.

Good final draft of a fundraising letter for Squaw, after way too much batting back and forth in revisions.

* * * *

November 16, 2016

Awake at three am. Rip-torn white clouds are motionless in black sky. Sirius is up there, as always, always close. Only 8ly away, that one star is such an intense glimmerer, it almost seems to have something on its mind, some intentions for us. Now with the new administration coming in, my worries are circling back again, about that tragi-comic, cartoonish event “Total Environmental Collapse.” Sirius will still be watching steadily (no rescue at all to us) while this muggy planet clouds up and smudges over fast, and sours. An instance: La Paz, Bolivia, pristine ancient city at ultra-high elevations (like 14,000 ft?), has always thrived on a brook of water from the ancient glacier above it. Now the glacier is gone. As of 2009. A sere meadow of scree is where the glacier used to be. What will all those Incan, sexy, sparkly-eyed, high-cheekbone people do? And their berry-brown kids? And high-breasted maidens wearing brimmed Derby hats and huipils? I guess they’ll buy water. They’ll probably from an international cartel, maybe in plastic bottles, probably Nestlé.

* * * *

November 17, 2016

Finish newly (more cruelly) gutted “Things” draft.

“Plato” essay goes off to Threepenny.

Maggie falls by to invite to party, while I’m kneeling at ditch-spigot washing barley-seeds.

Storm windows going up around the ground floor.

Another engineer comes to bid on project of replacing defunct solar panels.

Candlelit little birthday celebration.

* * * *

November 18, 2016

Clear mild sunny. I incorporate Wendy’s changes to the Plato essay and send it back to her; and I write Joy asking, definitely now, that the “Assistant” manuscript be withdrawn from consideration anywhere, no ambiguity.

* * * *

November 20, 2016

Rain.

Last night sushi in town with Seelys and Malsams.

Ever since I met my composer friend at MacDowell who advocated regular Sabbaths (in his case, a cigar and the Sunday Times and an adirondack chair), I’ve tried to emulate him. Today, stayed indoors for an entire day. Solid rain Sunday.

Help with the programming of Squaw’s on-line pay page.

* * * *

November 21, 2016

Brett’s birithday.

Smell of roast duck in the house, elaborate fat-rendering. Fine penetrating silky oil on all things.

* * * *

Cold-snap frosty morning, groggy man emerging from the back end of our woods by the highway, wearing a blanket, around the time the kids are congregating for their yellow school bus. The guy with the dreadlocks from the river. Little-known fact: Dreadlocks, if not kept clean, are the home of different life forms, mold mildew, a long-lost engulfed roach clip.

* * * *

November 25, 2016

Thanksgiving in Squaw. Fresh snow, and its bracing, gladdening headache in full sun.

Dash and I get a good look at a Northern Flicker who poses for us at length on the Annex deck.

Smoked trout and pate de volaille.

All Baileys and Halls, too, and Holzapfel and Cavendish.

It’s agreed, small turkeys are much better.

Others, late into the night playing elaborate dominoes game.

Morning after, stay in bed and read Michael’s story in eTimes. In Annex living room Brett and Dash trying to reprogram his new phone. All visitors from other time zones are sleeping in.

Difficult trip home, over summit in blizzard, small car packed with Brett, Dash, Sands, grandmother, and me. Plus dog. To left and right along the way, spun-out sedans. A big-rig is stranded jackknifed, center-road at Emigrant Gap’s long ascent, with cars moving carefully around it to left and right, a couple of other unlucky losers spinning their wheels as their cars slowly rotate on tilted road surface. Dash is importantly helpful installing chains at the roadside at around 7000 ft. elev. Descending into Blue Canyon at about 4000 ft. the snowflakes turn to rain, and the chains come off at the Washington-Road turnoff. Lie down once again in the slush, embrace tire to start pinching at the rusty chain clasp behind there in the wheel well, while reminded of adolescence and unhooking of girl’s brassiere, a dissonant notion here. At home, Barbara needs to be installed in her armchair, so all is well. Then there’s Luke and Maggie’s merry hearth, their low house, deep under the storming cedars at the end of their washing-out road. Maggie’s accordion, Randy and Murray on reeds and strings, Luke’s big, popping tenor-guitar sound. I, uncharacteristically, sing a song – with an advantageous hoarseness from the day’s work in the cold. (Jimmie Rodgers)

* * * *

November 27, 2016

Day of convalescence. Day of no ambition. (It’s days like this I’m grateful for accomplishable tasks: and the perfect instance is trundling a big standard-issue garbage container out to the roadside, its plastic wheels on gravel rumbling loud in the twilight stillness.)

Coming up on the knoll from putting the hens away, the last light of day is rusty and obscure. Ahead of me, in that kitchen, is potatoes and onions and chicken sausage. November dusk sometimes, the old color “brown” is capable of radiating from deep inside things with the force of embers – with the penetration of blast-furnace. But yet, in the cold, keep its somber shroud, dousing everything.

* * * *

Propane in Squaw:

Apache: 489 cu. ft. — (on 11-29-16)

Annex: 354 cu. ft. — (on 11-29-16)

Maybe an anthology:

Robert Frost

Henry James

Thomas Nagel

Jane Austen

Allen Ginsberg

(Varney’s Hardware)

* * * *

Before hard freeze, must bring in fancy “hydrator.”

* * * *

Half-constructed notion involving “anthropic” cosmology

— (this isn’t any cogent idea or a mystic insight, it’s just a sort of sloppy fantasy leading nowhere clear, which came to me half-asleep last night):

Given the necessarily “congregant” nature of all consciousness (congregant in its social and semiotic origins, and in its social and semiotic sustenance);

and given the necessity of consciousness in this universe (the “anthropic” principle) —

Well then, consider two planets: ours, which senses itself to be at the “center” of the universe; and another planet way out in the recently photographed galaxy EGS-zs8-1 (there really is such a one), which exists 13B light years away in what we like to think of as the “furthest edge” or the universe. (The fact is, EGS-zs8-1 feels itself to be at the center; it sees us as the dim remote outlier; it sees us hovering just at the curtain of darkness which marks “the beginning of time.”)

Furthermore, it is a fact of astronomy that we’re seeing the galaxy EGS-zs8-1 in past-time. We’re seeing it 13B years ago — because it took the light of its spectacle 13B yrs to reach us, across the 13B ly of space. Similarly, anybody on EGS-zs8-1 would be seeing our quaint little planet “Earth” at a time when it was scarcely an inchoate wisp, 13B yrs ago, on a forlorn rim of the universe, indeed not yet aborning, still swirling in stardust and gas.

Now, neither planet’s consciousness precedes the other, neither in “Time” nor in cognitive priority. The question would be, if consciousness is a “congregant” phenomenon, AND consciousness is a teleological basis of the cosmos, how does our consciousness already interact with that which has evolved separately on EGS-zs8-1? Is there any “entanglement” phenomenon? When EGS-zs8-1 and we both look at the same star, for example?

Definitely only a half-thought interesting to record but more of a dream than an idea.

* * * *

December 1, 2016

Afternoon clearing brush: a few years’ accumulation of blackberries (they’re teeming up as high as the roof) all around cold north side of potting shed, sites of old compost heaps.

* * * *

December 4, 2016

Afternoons of clearing brush, then axe-splitting hardwood rounds and bringing it, with cedar, into the house for the winter. On kitchen door, twinkle-eye Pabby knocks (a K-Mart shopping bag under arm, stuffed). She confesses she got carried away bringing in chard. So tonight chard sauce is on the smoked-chicken sausages with old dried porcini that have been on the shelf forever.

The day after Christmas. Wake in the night, all the usual practical anxieties. Spend the morning sending off emails of Xmas carol. Then the afternoon snowshoeing with Brett and the boys in the deep woods over the spine of Washington Ridge, about 5000 ft. Amber sun keeps striking us thru trees wherever we go; blue are the holes poked in the snow: so amber-and-blue are the colors in snow. Picnic of cheese, bread, candy, apples, a single tall bottle of beer to pass around.

In the cottage with leftovers of Xmas dinner: Tracy, Emma, Sands, Hunter.

Barbara keeps reflexively hoisting her full wineglass out at people, smiling: people clink it with their own glasses and she sets it down. Repetitious convivial glass-clinking is going to become the theme of the evening. At last Barbara, lifting it out again, says, “Why won’t someone take this from me?”

* * * *

December 23, 2015

The night is cold, sparkling. Only a few shrunken stars, grains of lost salt.

Water-crystals on the meadow. A foot of snow will have fallen by tomorrow evening, but right now the sky is clear. Covering all the irrigation heads and spigots with straw or whatever comes to hand. An old dog-bed, fleece-upholstered oval

* * * *

December 20, 2015

Christmas shopping.

To Pearson Small Engine to pick up generator.

* * * *

December 18, 2015

A better roof for the poultry run: corrugated tin, $27.50 per 24ft of coverage.

Instead, I poke a row of holes in the (useless anyway) tarp and suspend an old length of rain-gutter to conduct the dribbles away.

Xmas spirit: I get an email from the usual politician: “HAPPY HOLIDAYS, JONES”

* * * *

December 19, 2015

Thanksgiving is gone but now everyone is here again. All the front rooms of the house to be heated, and serving platters again to be pulled down.

Tracy in the cottage. Salmon (sriracha/honey/ginger/soy).

That wonderful midday meteorological phenomenon: You can be working outside in the sleet and it’s miserably cold. Then the rain turns to snowflakes, and suddenly the air is warm, tropical, you want to take off your scarf.

Thinking of the impossibility of combining a novelist’s practices with the “right speech” commandment of the dharma: (G. Snyder comes to mind. A poet with a fidelity to the right-speech rule. His “think like a mountain” thing is the result.)

* * * *

December 16, 2015

New shelf barley-fodder sprouts.

Two rat traps in the broccoli.

* * * *

December 10, 2015

Good Nor-Cal-sized rain at last, as if the biosphere were doing fine. Last night it was oyster chowder for dinner. I continue to worry that Hunter and Dash, fifty years from now, might not be getting the seafood anymore, especially the mud dwellers, or the big top-of-food-chain fish. Or much else, of the fruit of the earth. Will they have the abundant salmon and trout and big scallops and decent cuts of beef? Will they have the good cabernet $4/bottle and the luscious dirt-grown tomatoes? Or be able to lie down in an unmown meadow? The sensuousness of contact everywhere with the biome I, as an organism, evolved in, gustatory, tactile, wind-in-hair, wind-in-mouth, wind-in-ears, feet on dirt, etc. For the infinitely adaptive human race, one pictures far-future life on this Earth like a colony on some other star’s exoplanet: alkali wastes with habitations that look like the old Kodak flashcubes, or like bubble-wrap. This year there’s no crab harvest because the hot ocean waters have induced a neurotoxin in all the coastal Dungeness. (A tradition elided: Thanksgiving without cracked crab this year.) One worries that by century’s end people will be reminiscing, improbably, about how sweet and easy was life when there was still a Gulf Coast, when there was still a Florida. Before people lived on tofu only, and other frankenfoods. When you could go outside without sun protection. When New Jersey had a view of the ocean unblocked by dikes. Before all the refugees from Calif-Nev-Ariz came to the Midwest to live in migrant squats in fields and yards and alleys (BMWs and Saabs and SUVs, all with Calif. plates, encircled in a camp. Former “artists” and “writers” looking for work of any sort).

Heavy rain comes and goes this morning. It’s been raining long enough now, this morning the forests’ soil breathes the fishy smell as if we were at the coast in low tide. The milk we’re buying these days, in an old-fashioned glass bottle, isn’t homogenized, so clots of cream fall into your coffee, and then, stirred, the coffee surface carries a sheen of golden beads like butter.

* * * *

December 9, 2015

Power outage last night. Generator failed: apparently because gasoline has been sitting in it for a year, so the carburetor is “lacquered.”

So we ate pasta by flickering light. During the couple of hours when it was just Barbara and me stranded together, I found the Dobro and delighted her with all the old songs. She faintly yodels guessing at melodies.

Bigger storm systems coming. This morning: drag heavy generator onto pickup bed, using old Squaw doors as a ramp, bring to Pearson Small Engine, arrive just as the windshield is starting to collect aerosol rain.

The workday is lost to this small emergency, so:

Get going on TTCF reports

Write and send novel summary for Joy

Test-drive Brett’s new Squaw apps

Spend an hour on the “dependent arising” lecture of Bikkhu Bodhi

Must decline the invitation to bluegrass jam at the brewery for, instead, the family scene here.

Sitting with capp in front window of café, reading Price’s police-investigative novel (about how bad it is in the New Jersey ghettos, where love is born only to be insulted/disappointed) – the author’s gratuitous tour through the county morgue’s gurneys of atrocities – I’m about to give up on Richard Price – and I look out the window, and a girl at that perfect age is passing, with all the regalia of that perfect age, she’s stylin’, having a great afternoon just taking power in the street.

And after she’s passed, above the storefront façades across the street, in the overcast pre-storm sky, a great black handkerchief of black birds is flipping and flipping, a “meme,” all enjoying a single mind, slashing this way and that, and obviously it’s exultation, a condition of bliss, far above New Jersey’s misery and even far above the pretty girl’s.

* * * *

December 7, 2015

Yesterday’s pleasure: Riding in the passenger seat while Dash drives. All along Ridge Road. Around the new development there. Down College Drive. At the stoplight, turn left onto East main, with turn signal flashing. Intermittent rain/sun. Random conversation.

Talk with Joy. She likes “Immanence” and will try to sell it in NY.

Review (again) to Gary and Jack.

Have declined to go to SF for Nion’s party, and it’s surprising how much the decision is burdened by the expenditure of fuel. This even though it be vegetable-oil fuel. Vegetable-oil fuel, too, has its carbon footprint. The old vague moralistic twinge is now a full-blown debility.

* * * *

December 6, 2015

Sunday morning. Northern California is still getting rained on.

I can hardly separate my own darkness from the darkness of the world’s future. The heedless way we’ve treated the earth’s biome, and the cruel way we’ve treated the earth’s peoples. Refugees driven hither by desertification, and terrorists by poverty. Just this week in Paris, the nations’ diplomats are failing to reach an agreement in the “climate talks,” for the simple reason that we here on Indian Flat Road feel like driving into town to Bonanza Market for a pint of ice cream.

In the midnight, lull between rain showers: I’m outside in cold-front’s stillness, windlessness, silence, the only sound the tinnitus of the electronic varmint-repulsion gadget in the garden.

I come inside the house, and all is warm, all sleep. In the kitchen a chart has been posted for some while now, which I’ve never stopped to look at. It’s a grid, with the days of the week stretching out horizontally. The following daily devoirs are listed vertically:

Biology Homework

Spanish Homework

English Homework

History Homework

Psychology Homework

Geometry Homework

Young Composers

Exercise

Guitar

Reading

15 min/class studying

Chores

The first day – a Monday – is answered by a column of firm checkmarks, one checkmark for each of these accomplishments, including even “Chores.” But the next six weeks are an empty grid. I have no idea how long it’s been up there. The page is held by fridge magnet to an out-of-the-way cupboard surface, where no one will have to consult it or notice it.

One of my favorite things: that as I come to bed, or as I get out of bed, all sleep, all snore, everybody, even the dog and the two cats, solidly.

* * * *

December 4, 2015

Rain. Head cold persists, just as bad, and it does impair my working. Still adding new pregnancy/abortion scenes to Assistant.

A beautiful evening, all reading out of the “Rise Up Singing” songbook.

* * * *

December 2, 2015

Rain coming in tomorrow, and it feels like rain today. I’ve got a cold but made a good morning’s work. Entire new scene in Assistant.

Teeth cleaned at dentist 1:30; reading-plus-soup at a restaurant; pick up Dash and, during his guitar lesson, reading-plus-coffee in main street café. (Reading Richard Price’s “Freedomland,” doing my best to admire it. Succeeding in admiring it. Had never yet read any Price.)

After this, I ride in the passenger seat of my own car, while Dash steers it in the deepening twilight around the car-free roads of the valley. Twenty minutes.

* * * *

My dental hygienist wants to give her son a puppy for Christmas. Her needle prods in my gumline and finds no recession since my last checkup. ’Bout the same. When I’m all done with her, standing at the tall counter I’m given a business card with the agreed-upon moment of my next checkup inked onto the blank line: “June 7, 2016, 1:30PM.” I’ll still be alive then, and I’ll be showing up on time. Out in the parking lot, the sky overhead is overcast.

* * * *

December 1, 2015

I’ve been finding myself thinking about the Noble Eightfold Path’s eight ordinances more specifically, and more individually, one-by-one, and have hit upon an unhappy thought: about “Right Speech” if I were a Buddhist. (You don’t have to be a Buddhist to think “right speech” is a good idea.) A vocational writer is going to be especially unfit ever to conform to the Right Speech requirement with any perfection. His whole métier is devoted to so much incautious speech, experimental speech, enthusiastic speech, groping speech. Which gets ironed out of final drafts, but is the madness that, up until the uttermost final draft, swamps the workbench.

(Right speech: “Seeing nothing that isn’t there, and the nothing that is.”)

* * * *

Dash, with DMV permit, receives his first driving lesson after school, then on coming home drives his mother and me around these quiet mountain roads, through woods, openly enjoying triumph, for a half-hour before dinner. Turns on his favorite radio station and hangs elbow out window.

* * * *

November 28, 2015

Day trip to Squaw. Dash and two of his friends ride along. Sunny day with fresh snow, windless, each cedar bough along the road a white ladle. The boys go sledding below the Annex while I work.

Check traps (one bushy-tailed woodrat)

Disconnect fan switch upstairs

Replace non-rock-room curtains

Read gas meters (Annex: “002”) (Upper house: “017”)

Baseboard in Annex basement

Annex furnace

* * * *

November 25, 2015

Day before Thanksgiving. Snowflakes are fast-falling, fluffy.

I always think of this (very old) farmhouse as a musical instrument, which we play, wheezily. Starting today, and for the Thanksgiving weekend, all the parts that are usually cold will get opened and warmed. Most evenings of the year, Brett and I alone, for our civilized entertainments, can warm up in the back mudroom with just the stove.

* * * *

Add this to the list of “goldilocks” circumstances that make life on planet possible: the surrounding magnetic field.

There happens to be a still-molten iron core in the planet, which happens to be churning in a pattern (convection currents in there as it cools, plus Coriolis-force from planet-spinning) that creates an immense electric dynamo: iron electrons in revolving inner currents. The resulting magnetic field around the planet protects against deadly cosmic sunburn rays. It allows plants to live.

* * * *

November 24, 2015

Four AM, with coffee in driveway, thinking for sure, that one thing we moderns will have had in common with the Indians who used to live here is gratitude. Not much else in common, unfortunately. But gratitude. Cold storm from Gulf of Alaska is coming in – early snow will pile on trees that are still leafed out, so branches will snap and power failures are predictable – and already now, in the humid warm dark pre-dawn, the mountains all around are generating the seashore surf sound of pre-storm turbulence. The Nisenan Indians who lived here will have known the same sound. Since there does exist such a thing as “gratitude,” it implies the existence of something to be grateful to, a theistic problem as impenetrable to the Nisenan, then, as to us now.

* * * *

November 21, 2015

Brett’s birthday: dinner-and-movie.

Dinner, Dashiell’s choice, is at Big A Drive-In, where Brett and I both have the ancho chili burgers with avocado and Dash has the Barbecue Bacon Cheese, and the soundtrack is AC/DC, Steely Dan, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin. The movie, afterward, is about a stranded astronaut, with lots of special effects, white spacecraft wheeling in sterile interstellar space, Martian red-dust storms. In our cushioned seats we pass around ice cream Dibs and Sour Patch Kids. An exactly perfect evening.

All the while, news of Paris terrorism is on the radio, and while the spade keeps plunging and chopping I’m thinking of sad things like the inevitable departure of Dash for life elsewhere, the shortness of a book’s existence. But the day is warm, the sun low in the sky – so all the afternoon keeps looking like end-of-day, a brilliant bronze twilight even in the noon: a gold skimming light makes the grass tinsel. Hens peck in that heavenly place.

* * * *

Who works harder than the bum? Nobody.

* * * *

At last a few tears for Paris. I’m driving to town and, on National Public Radio, a not-so-young Parisian woman is being interviewed: she gave blood at a clinic yesterday. Squeaky tremulous little voix Parisienne. The day after the terrorist attacks – where a hundred-some boys and girls were killed, never to be revived, their blood flowing out on the dance floor, or on the café terrace to be mopped up – hundreds of Parisians who had no ability to fight terrorists or bring back the dead went to clinics and gave blood. That old fluid in their veins, du sang, is a common currency and, for some, the only investable asset.

* * * *

November 15, 2015

Hard rain all day. The whole day chopping up the Ginsberg review after storm of self-doubt. I’ve gotten so I hate having “opinions.” Especially my own. Should stop writing reviews, except of books I admire in a purely unmixed way.

* * * *

November 14, 2015

Amy my niece comes visiting from Sacramento. Her novel has gone to an agent.

Lunch at Three Forks.

A beautiful warm Saturday all day, clear skies, no hint of the predicted rain (1in./24hrs).

Then Brett and I working together leveling new-enclosed ground. Got halfway through it. She talking of lots of ideas for raised beds, enclosed greenhouse shelves. Afternoon dims. Smell of other people’s woodstove smoke. November dark is early, cold here soon after shadow of oak falls, and while I do what the Sioux were appalled to find the Mennonites doing in the prairie (turn sod), it’s a pleasure to be discovering by spade all the old, eternally fresh, white mycorrhizal fungus along wort roots like confectioner’s sugar, the sod’s underground civilization, as the air gets darker the stuff seems to (if not literally) phosphoresce, the glowing thing in the gloaming, source of light in the soil.

* * * *

November 13, 2015

Done with fence stapling. I’ve got back the technique (hold the staple with needle-nosed pliers while striking with hammer). The work goes fast.

The question will be: where to get salvaged materials for the walls of raised beds. (I can’t, anymore, picture lumberyard fir’s hard bright new-grown, planed flesh. Not on this property anymore.)

* * * *

Paris terrorism (100 killed in nightclub) conflated with my own local broken-heartedness.

Sleepless, I go in the garage to find heavy-duty rat trap, because those scritchy noises are in the walls again. Brilliant stars up there, same as ever.

Coming out of garage, I bump into Pabby in the dark. She has put Barbara to bed and is leaving for home. (Barbara is being watched closely today, as last night was a bad night.)

Pabby remarks on my weird equipage, because I happen to be holding the makeshift chicken-killing gear, and must explain. An old sock to serve as pacifying hood for a doomed hen. And an open-at-both-ends Contadina tomato-paste can that, nailed down on the cedar stump, would provide the pillory to immobilize her when I lift the axe.

* * * *

November 12, 2015

Spent afternoon getting a start on fence stapling.

Toyota to the shop for oil change. (Cappuccino in Calif. Organics for an hour reading Galway’s novel.)

* * * *

November 9, 2015

Good long rain. Bit of snow here, up on San Juan Ridge. And first chain controls over the passes.

At last getting to work on “Haram Halal” story. Beautiful warm fall day. I spent the whole day in bed like an invalid, with laptop, except that I got up once to go outside and dispatch an irremediably sick hen.

* * * *

November 5, 2015

Brett’s fundraising letter goes out.

Starting up the barley-sprouting operation again on shelves.

* * * *

November 4, 2015

Good long deep slow rain. Two days of it. Good for the water table.

* * * *

October 31, 2015

Configuration of the Venus-Mars-Jupiter syzygy keeps changing. Observed over the month before each dawn, it seems evident: the outermost planets travel faster than the inner planets.And overtake them. Which is not intuitive. Laws of motion would have the inner planets on speedier tracks. Still, every day I see Mars gain on Venus. And Jupiter surpass them both.

(Possibly this is just perspectival? Jupiter is in fact going slow but, in its remoteness, somehow seems, from Earth’s shifting perspective, to exceed the others.

Today is the last day of October. Drain both evaporative coolers, put all storm windows up. Get up ladder and tarp the main evap. cooler.

Hitch cart to bring up the oak rounds from the lower woods. Dump them in east meadow to weather for a year before splitting.

Now, with promise of the good storm to arrive in early morn (NOAA: “the first major snow event for the Sierra”), I’m tucked up with firewood supply, cupboards and cellar sufficient, and I think of my two sons: one is on the East Coast, mornings rising early, optimistically, for a commute to a job he seems secure in, and happily effective in; the other is out tonight trick-or-treating in the balmy dark streets of town, popular among friends. Still, it’s a long road out there, and each alone has to travel it, each his own griefs and errors – there will be crossroads of despair, too, not only bright valleys – and not resting when the moon isn’t yet up and the road is dark.

The ditchwater spigot in the veg. garden is leaking steadily, but I like it, and will leave it.

* * *

October 30, 2015

First draft of short story “Haram Halal.” Also, rediscovered old story about prostitute encounter in the Tenderloin.

Afternoon, cut up the large oak that has lain at the foot of the far woods for months. Its lying and curing may have softened it a bit, or may have hardened it the more, because the grain is iron.

Nevertheless, fresh-sharpened chain went through the whole thing in three hours.

Evening, lots of confusion in getting Dash and friends to “Comedy Club” night, at high school. His girlfriend’s car needed a jump, stuck in driveway.

* * * *

Oct. 28, 2015

Sudden trip to Squaw. My presence is necessary for installation of propane tank.

Check rodent traps and find nothing.

It’s lucky I’ve driven up here because some carpentry (outside purview of Ferrellgas installers) is necessary for access to front gas meter.

A light mist rain anoints all three of us, FerrellGas workers and I, as we struggle to put in new meters, north side of house. Steely sunshine through rain.

Later, at PlumpJack alone, I make lunch of an appetizer at the bar.

Storm over the summit. This little Japanese pickup wouldn’t do well if the rain turned to snow, but it doesn’t.

* * * *

A big noisy rat (it’s actually Templeton; it’s Templeton himself, sovereign glutton of our compost heap) has fallen into the lidded garbage bin (the lid was up) and now he can’t climb the sheer inner wall. Rather than finding a way of murdering him where he is, I’m going to leave him in there, with the lid clapped on tight, and tomorrow the whole can, set out at the roadside, will be, by a robotic arm, tossed into the big green “Waste Management” truck, and he’ll be transported on a cruise to rat heaven, the county dump, where there will be a view of the Desolation Wilderness peaks, snow-capped even in summer. So he can have a life, an afterlife, far from this place of hunger and fear and competition.

* * * *

October 27, 2015

Cold snap coming, as well as rain; presaged, typically, by a warm, increasingly overcast, still day. It’s a quiet day far and wide.

One hen is crippled by (apparently) a sprained or broken leg. But I’m keeping an eye on her, thinking of remedies, before resorting to euthanasia. (The prefix “eu-” is distinctly wrong in this case.)

Expedition to town: Doctor appointment, case wine, a fill-up with (bio)diesel behind the Grass Valley barn, Dash at music lesson.

* * * *

October 26, 2015

Posts are up, and all the fencing is up (using old rusty rolls of yesteryear, from the woods), though not yet stapled. The area of arable ground is now increased by about 70%.

* * * *

October 24, 2015

Nion’s party in Marin. A wonderful day.

* * * *

October 23, 2015

With leftover copper naphthalate, stain the bases of old split-cedar posts.

Get a start digging post holes.

Tennis with Michael and Emily.

* * * *

Oct. 22, 2015

Filling in the trenches where old fencing has come out, but only desultorily, inefficiently, as I’m taking care of my hurt back. (Dragging to below-the-outhouse woods: big rolls of good galvanized gopher-wire, for reuse.) A few minutes practicing the set for the weekend party

* * * *

October 21, 2015

Most of the day tearing out old fencing, untrenching the gopher-wire, backbreaking work because it unavoidably involves bending over and pulling.

* * * *

Dinner in Barbara’s casita. Pesto and roasted summer squash. Much discussion of Dash’s accession to the status of driver’s-license holder! And how shall he finance his driving.

All the while Barbara, at the table, looks worried and lost. At last she says, “. . .Well, what a stupid discussion.” (It’s the kind of remark that has always made her feel better.)

Anyway, Dash then has gone off to homework, and Brett adjourns to go outside and call in her cats. Barb and I are alone at the table, a dilemma oddly embarrassing to us both. We used to love platicando (when she was younger and had all her wits), but now she’s always disoriented, and always on the brink of panic, worried that she doesn’t know where she is or who is at the table, at heart worried that she might be behaving inappropriately.

* * * *

October 21, 2015

Yesterday: a day eaten up by pleasures and duties. Harvest all the basil before frost and make blender-full of pesto. Freeze it. Learn set list for Nion’s party. Travel in pickup to Auburn, with Brett, to get the jump on everybody else in the world and buy a super-cheap leather chair advertised on Craigslist. Which turned out to be ugly. About which I’m relieved. Because all purchases in the affluent American economy are for inward reasons, not for any necessity.

Again, a day of no work.

This morning early, at dawn, the Mars-Jupiter-Venus array is more wonderful than ever. A couple of falling stars. And two sightings of space junk (one of them a satellite SEASAT, which has been defunct since 1978, having worked for only two months before a big electrical short circuit killed it.)

* * * *

October 19, 2015

Doing “extra credit” reading of Ginsberg and other so-called Beats. I’m working too hard on this for the little money I make, but Ginsberg seems worth the effort. Or rather, not so much Ginsberg as the friends he was flacking for.

Barbara is feeling poorly and Brett is worried. “Hydration” is the answer. Always the answer.

Got another wood rat, in trap in studio.

Prawns are cheap, SPD, and the same adobo-chile continues to work well, with white beans and tomatoes.

* * * *

October 18, 2015

Train home, from SF to NC. Traintracks level with the polluted waters of the Carquinez. The homeless campers, suburbanites, with their REI gear, all along railroad sidings.

* * * *

October 17, 2015

The apartment needs olive oil, so I’m in Molinari’s on Columbus. The man behind the counter is being good to the tourists, who insist they’re “100% Italian and love wine.” The man behind the counter says he hasn’t had a drink in 25 yrs.

Where’re you from?

Well, the tourists are from San Luis Obispo, Las Cruces, Lompoc. The man behind the counter says “Yeah, I know Lompoc. It’s pretty around there.” Then he turns to me, talks me into buying two bottles: one bottle is extra virgin, the other that’s just puro, only for sautéing. The old folks’ll kill for this.

He hands across my bottles and assures me the puro oil makes no burning smell, cooks at high temperatures. Then, as I’m gone, he turns back to his friend, “Yeah, I go down there. Guido and John are still doing time, and I go down every once in a while.”

* * * *

San Francisco is such a small town. I see at two in the morning all apartments’ lights are out. I remember New York in the seventies: at two in the morning a crossword-puzzle pattern of unlit and lit windows.

* * * *

Reading to the assembled masses (my essay in Threepenny) on Valencia Street. Dinner afterward at a bar with Charlie and BK.

* * * *

October 16, 2015

Writing in the morning.

Post Office in North Beach.

City Lights – spent a long time upstairs in poetry. At a new fish place at the foot of Union, ceviche and white wine at happy-hour prices.

* * * *

October 13, 2015

I’m working in Macondray Lane upper room, and the church bells down in the square start tolling – but it’s 11:24 am, not the hour – so of course, these are the bells that toll for me. A writer’s best friend. One day I’ll finally be wholly “published.”

So what I do now is, I just go on working.

* * * *

October 15, 2015

Day alone in SF. All are gone but me. I scarcely leave house, snack on stale stuff, work hard. Spend the day spider-like on that filament-strand connecting.

* * * *

October 14, 2015

City thrift-shop browsing with Brett and kids. Sidewalk enjoyment of just being around these two grown panthers, bored and powerful, no longer kittens, Dash and his friend Lliam.

Barbary Coast Award. The old Theatre Artaud. Music is great (Los Train Wreck), until I get up and, unrehearsed, bellow my song into mic without vocal monitor.

Then home and, till after midnight, wine on the roof with Sands and Brett, exulting in our laureate condition.

* * * *

October 13, 2015

In San Francisco for award. Dinner at a crummy Thai place on Polk. (Dash and friend Lliam, Brett, Sands)

* * * *

October 11, 2015

Two days in Squaw to shut down house.

Alone, working on not writing. So I’ve got hammers and nails.

Dobro.

Dinner alone at PlumpJack bar, a stir-fry topped by fried egg. On the TV above the bar a football game. The NY Giants just barely beat the SF 49ers.

* * * *

October 9, 2015

Another day no work.

6am: haul everybody out into the driveway, pajamas, barefoot, to see the near-syzygy of Jupiter, Mars, Venus, moon. Moon is crescent, but with full-round, secret fullness lit by Venus’s reflected light.

* * * *

Thurs, Oct 8

No work today.

Christian mysticism lecture.

Conversation with Lannon: “Sorry, but no.”

Salvaged boards for 6×6 raised bed in garden.

Nev. Co. Farm Supply for gopher wire, irrigation.

Tilapia in adobo-lime butter, and the sad (October) string beans of the end of the season – which everybody is oddly patient with, eating them blossom-end to stem-end, pulling the tough non-biodegradable strings like dental floss.

* * * *

October 7, 2015

Just before sunrise today again, a line-up of Moon-Venus-Mars-Jupiter. Brighter and closer-clustered than yesterday.

The star Betelgeuse in Orion: a supergiant star as big-around as the entire orbit of Jupiter. It’s very distant (570 light years) but still visible (being so big), moving away at a high rate of speed, and I find I have to laugh, standing in the open driveway. Very little makes me actually laugh anymore, but the sheer unlikeliness/implausibility does it. These are all sparks in explosive flight. Yet there’s sufficient time in the midst of the Big-Bang explosion for life (here on this one cooled cinder) to evolve and look up.

“Auspicious” is the word for today: letter sent to Baker; Immanence sent to Joy; notion hatched of front-end fix to “The Assistant”; finished with first-draft Ginsberg piece. Heads-up coins lay in my path everywhere today.

* * * *

October 5, 2015

Reading done, did the first draft Ginsberg.

Then, day after tomorrow, back to the novel.

Dash is home sick from school.

(Very pretty display, around dawn, Venus-Jupiter-Mars, all visible in a clump, beside the crescent moon.)

I have to stop fooling with “Immanence” and send it off again, the Paradiso to my Inferno and Purgatorio.

* * * *

October 4, 2015

Letter for Baker Street.

Dinner with Josh and Jen.

* * * *

October 3, 2015

Saturday dawns clear and sunny, but a short rain is coming in.

That spider who so systematically dismantled her web has, overnight, put up a new one spanning the same clearing. The web isn’t as big, but it must be the same spider, my muse, my fellow-artist, because it’s basically the same design as the web she just took down. (She herself is not in evidence, a nocturnal.)

* * * *

October 2, 2015

Morning, meadow still steaming in sun, I’m pinning clothes on the line, and the huge drops of dew on the string are, of course, “pearls” (inevitable poetic device there) but crystal pearls. They drip into the humid shirts and skirts and pants and pillowcases – and these kinds of idyllic situations actually make me worry about the ecosystem. These improbable, but yet persistent harmonies in the local biome – the sun on schedule clearing the pines, the climate still not gone haywire, the bees getting a start in the clover and the one hummingbird poking in the tall rosemary spires as they just begin to release their perfume, the October soil a little colder than it was yesterday at this same hour, causing trees’ and shrubs’ root-juices to flow a little slower than they did yesterday. Things still work. Here I am at the pinnacle of evolution. There’s so much human migration going on globally now – especially from arid regions to colder, wetter regions – I wonder how much of it is climate-driven, that is, economy-driven (rather than politics, which is its ostensible driver). Because it’s all looking like the sci-fi movie of “dysfunctional” economy “post-apocalypse.” On this-here meadow, I can still pin laundry on the line at evolution-pinnacle, and the dew point all morning will sink dependably, for evaporation.

Ran into Gary in the market yesterday, and since I’m reading about Ginsberg, I asked and got a long appraisal of the whole Ginsberg/Kerouac/Corso/Burroughs embranglement. We must have stayed in the produce section for 45 minutes. He’s justifiably proud of what was accomplished back then by him and by his friends.

Doubles w/Michael and Emily.

* * * *

October 1, 2015

Rain overnight is quiet, steady.

Outside my trailer in the 4am dark, the big spider who has pitched her deathtrap all this past week has now decided to take it down. I first noticed the big doorway-sized web — magnificent spiral — a week ago, its portal to eternity spanning an open area beyond trailer. But the spider wasn’t home. Then the next night, deep in the middle-night, there she was, in the beam of my flashlight, she’s the size of a peso, eight-legged emblem in mid-air suspended.

Now it’s a few days later, and she was this morning at 4am taking down her elaborate house – spinarets gathering and chewing the silk, quickly pulling down the whole thing, strategically demolishing only the sections she wasn’t clinging to – and her abdomen was swollen about the size of a walnut.

* * * *

September 30, 2015

Overcast.

Cooler.

The air is so still. Of the ten thousand leaves on the pair of hundred-foot-tall oaks, each leaf looks enameled against the sky. When it’s an overcast damp day, the eye stops wincing and starts seeing more, absorbing more.

If we get a decent rain, as promised, maybe I’ll afterward go down to do the chainsaw work in the woods.

* * * *

September 27, 2015

One self-congratulatory minute: morning’s first break from work, kitchen, standing up before French doors eating old pasta out of plastic Tupperware, having written a good paragraph and knowing exactly what to write when I go back down to the trailer. And the very vain self-congratulatory resolve that in general I’ve shown competence: that in general I’m “A Maker,” standing on the floor I remade, under the roof I shingled, eating my own food.

Sunday-afternoon tennis

Total eclipse of moon.

All night, wild, restless coyote song widespread in the valley.

* * * *

September 26, 2015

Picking at rough spots in “Immanence,” once more thinking to send it off.

The last few pears, stragglers, amounting to one final big carton.

Now the Do-Not-Resuscitate Order is (as required) posted permanently on the refrigerator in the cottage, even as Barbara shuffles around complaining happily and miscellaneously. She never lifts her eyes to see it, nor could focus to read it if she did lift her eyes.

Today, the unavoidable dip into the economy: case wine at Grocery Outlet, ingredients for a soup at SPD, fuel additive at auto-parts place.

A sad day. I’ve been thinking for a long time that the pessimists could be right, the human population has been in “overshoot” for some while now. A die-off is nature’s usual riposte. It’s a sci-fi idea, and too lurid for rational consideration. But the tendencies are in the news. I don’t picture “humanity’s extinction.” Rather, the general discomfort will (from an economic point of view) feel like “Total Environmental Collapse” only locally, only in human subjectivity. It will entail lots of changes in diet, migrations of even the comfortable folk, lots of unfair reductions/concentrations of wealth. Cultural loss. And a significant population reduction. It’s already doing all those things.

This corn soup tonight: the good cod will go into it, and the Strauss cream. The most jubilant occasions of my life, actually, are the dinners when my fifteen-yr-old is home eating good food. Same when with Hunter. Nothing so enjoyable as watching your offspring feed, (as Brett says) like its bloody-muzzled face plunged into the loin of the fallen impala.)

* * * *

September 25, 2015

Four more cartons pears.

* * * *

September 24, 2015

Up early. In the living room with isolated brass lamp reading Ginsberg.

Today it’s picking pears and catching up with Squaw business and no work of my own. And same plan for tomorrow, too. Keeping away from my own writing, in spurts.

The Pope this morning is telling both houses of Congress, “Don’t think of the poor and the migrants as statistical numbers, but look in their faces,” his querulous, mewing voice (Italian accent) on the radio of the garage workbench, while I apply “J.B. Weld” cement to a cracked sprinkler-head (its harp bitten by the dog, snapped-off). Wrappings of rubber bands to secure for glue-hardening.

Says the Pope: “The people of this continent are not afraid of newcomers.” (applause)

Then all midday picking pears. Seven cartons.

Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation.

A quiche can be made out of what’s lying around.

At 7:00 is a reading, Molly and Christian in Grass Valley, drinks after.

* * * *

September 23, 2015

Happy with “Immanence.”

Another few minutes with A. Ginsberg in the new “Fox&Hound” place on Spring Street. I’m going to be at a loss to review this book fairly. He seems a congeries of affectations – but unaffected about his affectations!

Another mere hour picking pears.

This is the biggest year in memory for pears. I’m going to have to get serious and devote afternoons to bringing them in. Apples, by contrast, are basically nil.

Dinner: that inexpensive cut of pork goes on and on: great success with canned chipotles in adobo. (And, ab orgine, dumping chile powders on the surface of a cast-iron pan to scorch before adding vegetables.)

* * * *

September 22, 2015

Around equinox, late September, eight o’clock in the morning. This is the enchanted season and the right hour of the day – when pools of warm air swirl with pools of cool air. In choppy terrain of knolls and deep ravines and long forested slopes, the promise of winter gets churned right in with remembrance of summer. This on the slope of the west meadow along the corridor of figs, past cherries, leading down to work trailer.

Noon, done working. This heat wave is evidently never going to quit – I’d been waiting for a seasonable coolness to get into pear harvest – but at this point I just begin picking in the ninety-degree sun.

Great to be in Marin, Santa Venetia, it used to be the low-rent zone, now look at it, wonderful Marin mud-pungency of the tidal flats, Gallinas Creek.

And the drive with Brett. Down I-80 with espresso in paper cups. Seldom do two married grown-ups have a chance to talk.

* * * *

September 17, 2015

One good thing: all the new plantings are flourishing in the homemade soil mix. (Includes dirt from the abandoned compost heap plus year-old chicken shit)

Evidence of big rodent in trailer: it’s something with enough heft to knock the little painting (20-by-30-inch stretched-canvas) off my work desk, onto the floor.

Also (fee-fi-fo-fum), it seems to have knocked over my ceramic pen-holder cup.

Sure enough, there it is, in the heavy-jawed trap in the cupboard. This particular trap’s old zigzag jaws are scored, and actually beveled in places, by the sharp teeth of animals who in their last agony were trying anything they could.

Pinching off latter episodes of “Immanence” and rounding off an ending. Moving certain other sections up toward the beginning. Feeling very happy with the strange-shaped whole object.

Afternoon some necessary noodling with finances. An open interval (as seldom opens) for exercise “routine.”

Pick up Dash in town, to take him to guitar lesson. He’d gotten off the school bus and, carrying skateboard, walked all the way to Pioneer Park to spend an unscheduled hour alone practicing a trick. Thin tall boy at fifteen, practicing something all by himself, over and over. It’s an ancient situation.

His news, getting in the passenger side happily, is that he can do a front-side kickflip off two stairs.

Drizzle does arrive. Good rain smell of wet verdure, plus (it’s been a long time) the fine stovewood smoke-smell comes through the woods. It’s the forest deadfall that people up here burn frugally.

* * * *

September 14, 2015

All this talk about a trip to London in the spring.

Apart from the personal extravagance, there’s the environmental kind of splurge that gives me a pain. In the past few years I’ve very seldom gotten on an airplane. No amount of using the clothesline instead of the dryer, or reducing car trips and limiting fill-ups strictly to local veg-oil, no amount of off-the-grid scrimping, will make up for the foot-pounds of energy it takes for a plane to lift us three average Joneses, plus their baggage, up to cruising altitude and keeping us there over the polar route. A holistic accounting of the cost to total ecosystem would price that spectacle at a billion dollars. I’ll be able to say I’ve seen the Elgin marbles in person.

The Toaster Graveyard (below cherry grove) disgorges another toaster. I’d have thought we’d harvested every old kitchen appliance from that dump. Now the gleam of immortal chrome again, half-unburied, a gadget looking weightier than a Sunday pot-roast, from the days when things were indestructible and you couldn’t rub the shine off of them. In fact, I bet it’s actually the case that you could pull this out of the ground and dig the earth out of its toast slots and hose it off – and get it in working order again via a little rewiring.

(Old-fashioned soldering gun. Old-fashioned screwdriver. It would be an operation that would take place on a “workbench” — the workbench of a “repairman.”)

* * * *

September 13, 2015

Every 45 minutes or so, you’re supposed to stretch your legs, and I’m outside in the garden picking pocketfuls of beans for dinner. Beside me – already at ten am – the empty gas can on the shed wall says loudly “TINK,” as the heat of the day has made its metal floor pop. Which usually wouldn’t happen till about noon. Our blighted land: Heat wave goes on, so the morning is tired already at dawn. String beans are tough, no matter how young you pick ’em. Tomatoes aren’t ripening correctly, apples are stunted, precocious fruit trees need early harvesting. Smoke from the Butte wildfire makes a grove of cedars, right across the road, look like a photograph “Grove of Cedars” that’s been lying out on a shelf for a year getting evenly housedusted.

* * * *

Brett is amused: A few hens were scratching and pecking in the dirt under the pear tree. And then one heavy pear, big as a softball, dropped. From a six- or eight-foot height it might have hurt a bird. It landed on the ground among them. Came down with a loud thud.

The nearby hens gave it the eye — tilted their heads and gave it the eye from a fresh angle — then went back to scratching and pecking. This is what amuses Brett.

* * * *

September 12, 2015

Saturday. Slow getting to work.

Sun comes up whiskey-colored in the east: smoke from Butte fire.

Got the lettuce/kale/chard/leeks in the ground at last yesterday.

Actually played guitar for an hour yesterday, ineptly.

* * * *

September 9, 2015

Heat wave coming on.

Finally got to apple-tree repair.

Joan and Kaitlin come down to have lunch with (respectively, and separately) Barbara and Brett.

Proud of what I’ve been writing: this novel “Immanence” narrates a seldom-visited phenomenon: two grown-up men who are intelligent responsible human beings with integrity and wit and their own dedications, and also their own weaknesses, coming in conflict over matters of importance, portrayed without gimmick, without exaggeration or caricature.

On the patio in the sun (beside the teacup that has been out so long, on the inner bone-china surface, evaporation-horizons define the hot noons of at least a seven-day week), there’s a rectangle of corrugated cardboard where the ballpoint pen signature is rehearsed, shakily – Barbara E. Hall, Barbara E. Hall, Barbara E. Hall – in preparation for signing the Do-Not-Resuscitate Order that would be set before her.

* * * *

September 6, 2015

Sunday.

Revamped end of “Immanence.”

Garden: winter vegetables: for a change I bought some little flats of starts at Briarpatch: leeks, lettuce, kale, chard.

Set up hoses and sprinklers all over for serious irrigation of the tinder-dry meadows, as yesterday I hiked up to clear the weir, get out water pressure back.

Spent last bit of afternoon gentleman-like, reading poetry in shade, with wine, in Adirondack chair whose level arm supports a wineglass. Ginsberg’s anthology, his poetry plus the Mishnah that is the second half of the book, consisting mostly of letters and self-aggrandizement.

There are two kinds of comedians, the kind who tell “jokes” (Bob Hope) and the kind who tell the truth. Whose humor depends on the nuanced life they’ve observed. Among poets, Ginsberg is in the first category, strings of his gags (many tried-and-true and surefire, from earlier poems), with but little relation to our lived lives, little usefulness, not much wisdom, indeed rank foolishness.

His W.C. Williams-influenced poetry, esp. about his family, is a shining exception.

* * * *

September 3, 201

The bear has taken out a misc. small apple tree I’ve been babying along. The seven red first-sexuality apples on the one bandaged branch were gone this morning (the only apples of that tree’s blighted lifespan), and for some reason he snapped off the whole thing at the trunk. Looks like he sat on it.

This has been a Zero year for the Italian prune plums, but I’ve got plenty preserved from previous year’s overabundance. Last night they were a sauce for a small roast.

My neighbors in this Global Warming era, all dealing with so-called precocity of their fruiting trees by just picking early.

* * * *

September 1, 2015

“Back-to-School Night” was tonight. I went alone, the only interested party. The big rural high school, six earnest teachers. The green-stick beauty of the girls and boys. The moms and dads variously life-damaged, shambling around looking half uncomfortable, half broken-heartedly envious.

All public high school buildings, inside, feel a little bit like storm-sewers.

Dash is taking a full schedule of hard courses, no light electives.

Cooler night. It’s September and Alaska is sending its first low-pressure system into these latitudes. But no precipitation here, just a few days of low temps.

* * * *

August 31, 2015

Sometimes I think of people I’ll never be able to see again – Henry Carlisle, Bill Sheatsley now, Oakley, my own mother (and of course my father), Don Carpenter – and I think how my relationship with these ghosts is comparable to my relationship with those still here in the flesh. I.e., Brett, my boys, Barbara in her near-ghostliness now, my brother, my book agent Joy, faraway friends I get news of, even this town’s bank tellers and checkout clerks and grocery baggers. My relationship with the living differs, yes, from my relationship with ghosts, but what’s interesting is the ways in which the two relationships don’t differ. Not in their effective essence.

I think we live effectively in the light of our own death. For a few “decades” we loom in each other’s presence. Then we cease to. It’s the ceasing-to that emboldens the “life” episode.

We’re crucially absent, precisely all the time we’re present. That’s what’s sweet about our being here, that every moment we live through is already archived. It’s brought out of archives for its glint in the “specious present,” then returned forever.

Every time I stood in the sunshine talking with Bill Sheatsley – six-foot-six, white-bearded, saggy-jeaned, squinting like Popeye – while we talked about what grade of shiplap siding should cover the cottage or what nefarious corporate plot destroyed the Rudolph Diesel engine design, or how miraculous his spiritual healer’s ministrations were in curing his cancer – all the while he was radiant with death, and I suppose so am I, to the discerning.

* * * *

August 30, 2015

No writing today either.

Varney’s-Hardware essay arrives, pre-publication, looks great.

And I spend an idle morning reading two Threepenny issues, consecutive issues I hadn’t gotten to, with the fortunate sense of being in really sparkling company. Read them cover-to-cover. In bed, yet, with coffee.

Reweaving of chair seat with rush that came mail-order.

Dug out and severed principal root of the big fir tree on east side of house. Will now be watching treetop in suspense.

* * * *

Been home a month, and now for the first time this summer I made the two-mile run. So I’m back.

Out running, again I pass within sight again the The Willo, its little neon beer sign at the country crossroads. And I think again of the moral taint of every “crossroads.” – This is an ancient, rural thing. A forest thing. The Devil presides at the crossroads. When people limited themselves to the simple life at home and never left their acre – what is kashrut to the orthodox, halal to Muslim, Gelassenheit to Amish – then “going to the crossroads” is the encounter with all the forces of darkness and hilarity. Truly, they’re there, all of them in full force, the Seven Deadlies, right there in The Willo. And I begin in my new late-in-life self-pity indulgences thinking, Well right now I’m fortunate; right now there may be, certainly, privations and missed chances but mostly I’m in the Great Good Luck Department – but for years I was “no stranger to the rain, and I have been one acquainted with the crossroads. Exactly Robt Johnson’s confession: fell down on my knees. And now I wonder, how come more people who knew me didn’t worry about me? During my wilderness years, how come nobody thought it was a waste or a danger?

(On second thought, it’s not so much a “self-pity” indulgence, not at all, because, in fact, I ate all that up and in the end throve on it, all the bad times, the perfect thing for me, it’s what I sought ab origine, but I worry about others’ construction.)

Wonderful moment: Guests of honor today are two descendants of Nisenans (enrolled!), whose people actually were penned in right here on our hillside, 1930s (the last Campoodie, the last Rancheria, much of it on Jim Spencer’s land across the road, on my own property some grinding-mortars for pulverizing the acorns making bread of these same ancient oaks’ fruit). And the real elder arrives at the party (the grandmother, Ginger) and is presented to me as I am host, she comes escorted over the meadow by her daughter and a dignitary, where I am under the big oaks, and her first words to me are not Pleased-to-meet-you, or any such thing. She says, taking my hand in both of hers, worriedly, “How are your acorns this year?”

* * * *

August 28, 2015

Hot. The sky is a bright white haze all over.

No writing today.

Package up and send critique of Penelope Pier novel.

Draft a blurb for Max Byrd’s friend.

Favor to Brett, proofing a questionnaire about poets’ ethnicities.

Mow summer-tall grass on N. and E. sides of house.

Tennis.

That one little retarded apple tree out front alone, planted 15-20 years ago by George and Ginny, is this year bearing its first fruit – seven or eight red apples, on the one branch that last year got sprained. Then got splint-strengthened by me with lengths of stiff garden hose and many windings of duct tape. Its first fruit have an unusual caramel taste.

* * * *

August 27, 2015

Now it’s seven pm. I ought to be downstairs minding the polenta.

On the radio, Amy Goodman’s band will be striking up.

A hot sunny day in which I got a lot done.

Wrote deeper into a new short story about larcenous houseguests, thorough periodic cleaning of chicken premises, framed up the finished critique email for a book I’ve been editing, (all the while heavily watered north lawn as prep for its First Mowing of the Entire Summer), actually read most of an entire novel to fulfill a blurbing commitment, conversed for a whole hour with my agent by phone while standing in the driveway, squatting in driveway, sitting on gravel of driveway, shopped for food and supplies in town and picked up Dash and got polenta started.

But the walk to the mailbox just now, down gravel, to the paved road – the sudden acoustic serenity that prevails outside my hectic kitchen – (I seem to make a habit of carrying a fresh-poured glass of wine when I’m getting mail, which slows my gait, which is a good thing) – it’s been a long day, and it seems forever ago (3:30 am, it was) when, in the dark by the garage, I was gripping a new, spilling cup of coffee, dragging a four-wheel walker of Barbara’s out into the open to use it as a throne, bringing up my astronomy app on phone. Stars overhead, the absolute silence of that old violence in the sky – which seems frozen solid, in our little timeframe – sparkled all over the entire sky, and I got to know Capella really for the first time – one of the stars that, along with Vega and Arcturus and Aldebaran, (I can tell will become one of the great Ushers of the seasons, on these acres.) That hour was a totally different world.

* * * *

August 25, 2015

The endless string of sunny days in drought.

Our tomatoes and squash for some reason are accursed. But its sometyhing about soil or irrigation, not the heat. Beans do well.

B. purchases a soil-chemistry test kit.

No writing. Just clean-up of Penelope Pier book.

Afternoon: a couple of small fixes are knocked squarely off the to-do list: rehabilitation of Hunter’s BMW (battery-charge and tire-fill), and construction of knife-storage slot behind stove, two oak slats separated by rubber washers.

Out walking in the heat of the afternoon (on my iPhone earbuds is the tocsin of bad news about climate change), I pass the spot where my little road meets the highway, I see that “The Willo,” is, now at 4:45 pm, beginning to accumulate its quorum of quitting-time drinkers. Old pickups, fancy pickups, and one Corvette Stingray. Den of Iniquity, the social purpose of every Crossroads establishment, incl. Robt Johnson’s juke joints. Drink/eat to excess, flirt with horny neighbor, fight with newcomer, etc. All this is far from me, down at the corner of Newtown Road and Highway 49. (The “New Town” advertised by the name of Newtown road doesn’t exist anymore and never really did, though early last century it made an effort. It exists now as a quiet “crossroads” of its own, five miles along.) Meanwhile I’m actually thinking with wonder and gratitude of the Jew (Philo of Alexandria) who in the Diaspora was a Platonist and a Talmudist. Both! You want to fall on your knees sometimes in being made aware of the humaneness that is basic to humans and mostly wins out.

The Willo.

Always a full parking lot. It is the restaurant of oldest provenance in the county, and it’s windowless. Cinderblock one-room casket, the walls inside furnished with dozens of Varathane-slick redwood burl clocks (decoupage of Amer flag, Amer eagle, Elvis), made by the chef, who is a hobbyist. The kitchen specializes in (is limited to!) three kinds of steak, plus choice of cole slaw or fries. Plus beans, that’s the whole menu. Attached bar does have one window (high in the wall, gummed opaque). Outside, smoking lounge consists of broken office furniture on cement pad, enclosed on two sides by ripping-fluttering Visqueen-plastic sheets.

* * * *

Inexpensive cod comes into SPD: very successful chowder with corn and thyme.

* * * *

August 23, 2015

Eileen and Paul here early to do yardwork preliminary to party.

Bob sends Galway essay.

Soup of gingered pork and mustard greens tastes only tolerable and is muddy-looking. (Everybody around this table is a good sport. Nobody ever puts down his spoon and asks can we just get out a frozen pizza.)

* * * *

August 21, 2015

I’m done with another run-through of “All Things.” Increasing confidence in it.

Yet another dump trip today, with accumulated junk from behind the garage.

We’re free of Dash and Barbara tonight and may go out for dinner. Movie.

* * * *

Billy on his deathbed yesterday: “I love you,” with great smile of wisdom/delight/morphine.

When a Hindu (e.g., Billy) says I love you at death’s door, there are three words in the sentence, one a well-known transitive verb. The other two pronouns are mysterious.

That transitive verb love ought to function more like an intransitive, a nimbus, or even a grammarian’s copula. The two pronouns, the “I” and the “you,” are conflated to identity. It’s what Bill would have been escaping, this misery called love.

And Barbara’s groggy remark about Lawrence Welk’s accordion/banjo orchestra on TV: “I’m glad I’m not at that party.”

(Me, frankly I’d go to that party. I’ve always imagined that the Lawrence Welk performers – in their merengue-colored tuxes and swirly dresses, with the look of almost horrified jubilation in their eyes as they sing – must be (when backstage or off-duty) the lewdest most cynical, degraded bunch. Everything I know about musicians, and everything I know about actual show-biz mores (those shows were shot in the sixties, when musicians, who of course were better tuned in to popular culture, led very different lives from Lawrence Welk’s), makes me picture them lighting up cigarettes, etc., having illicit meetings in prop closets with the swirly-dressed, putting down Mr. Welk behind his back. Men’s and women’s perfectly shellacked hair onstage and their tireless grins seem like a certain kind of hell which they would come to resent.)

* * * *

August 20, 2015

Work this morning (and for past few days) on expunging any accidental “Christian” tones from All Things – (in the sudden, belated realization that 90% of readers out there are literalistic.)

(Interesting news: international coalition of Islamic scholars endorses restriction of greenhouse gas emissions, on spiritual grounds. And – typically, this is wonderfully Islamic – they ask for decentralized, local sourcing of renewable energy. This is Islam’s devotion to the poor.

It would be a reason why Good Writing (a term I employ without irony) is not popular:

I think people want “answers.” Simple ones. Few are able to hold two contradictory beliefs in mind at the same moment. (In other words, few “think.”)

It was Coleridge who named this mental knack (or else maybe Keats), calling it “negative capability”: the ability of a mind to recede into undecidedness, and just watch for a while.

Maybe call this negative capability “cold objective love.” Or call it “passionate detachment.” It’s really a mystical capability, this lack of immediate insight. It’s at base mystical. It has faith.

(Physics explainers seem have success urging “negative capability” upon people: They say It’s both a wave and a particle. That makes no sense but it will be mortals’ only way to face truth.)

This novel (All Things) I’ve been bringing up for more than ten years has, in recent years, broken through into frank mysticism. My big achievement, all these years on these acres in the foothills where living is cheap, is to have become this most useless thing, an anchorite. Especially regarding “religion” people have difficulty extending a little cold love. Or negative capability. Religion’s “answers,” for almost everybody, must be absolute. The report from an actual mystic (Cloud of Unknowing) is that absolute knowledge is the descent to absolute disorientation.

Mid-August the newspapers get skinnier because everybody’s on vacation. Wasps are bumbling in the sheds. At the Iowa State Fair, politicians roam, shown in photographs gamely eating stuff. At our local county fair Dash has lost his cell phone (which is a special kind of ignominy, and a special kind of blightedness, for a teenager). Record heat all week. Faint smell of horseshit sometimes from down the road, smell I’ve always loved. Traffic on a country road thins to one-car-per-hour (or one-car-per-afternoon!).

I’m not writing – “The bucket’s empty,” Richard likes to say when asked (almost a boast! or a gloat).

Sunday morning a proper salade nicoise, as Bob and Brenda stop by for lunch.

(Bob is working on a long biographical essay on Galway: a voyage of discovery: stories of Galway’s assignations and seductions, e.g., on Paris-Marseille train, when in the 60s, he had the perfect, the sexiest trench coat.)

* * * *

August 14, 2015

Home from Squaw.

Off-loaded furniture in the dooryard around the truck.

Dash has to be at the highschool at eight in the morning for (A) locker assignments; (B) class schedule confirmation; (C) textbook distribution.

* * * *

August 13, 2015

They’re not called “dumps” anymore, they’re called “Transfer Stations” – It creates a new metaphysical category replacing the damned-to-perdition category that was a dump. Nowadays our trash on earth floats: it’s being “transferred,” never landing permanently in a spot to molder and sink. A local Dump was a kind of hole, whereas a transfer station is a basketball-court-sized square of smooth cement, where everything you’re dismissing is, by a bulldozer’s blade, squeegeed to left and right, choosing where it shall be forwarded. It’s an arena where there are no losers, only winners and the deathless.

They’re always located, also, in some beautiful part of the remote county. I’ve been getting to know “Transfer Stations” and dumps, now that I’ve been living outside cities, and more and more, I find them heavenly, clean and breezy (“Distance makes clean” is the old Mexican saying), these places where permanent goodbyes transpire.

That is, if it’s not a high-wind day (so that dust-grit attacks the eye), or too hot (brewing the stench) – they can be serene, elegiac, zones of shriven justification when one is sweeping the last dust off the pickup bed, removing the work gloves, kicking off the last clinging Lego whose plastic recesses are packed with garden dirt from ten or fifteen years ago. “Numinous” places (Mircea Eleade) are places where other-dimensional worlds intersect with this world. Nevada County’s transfer station, on its slope, is located where it will always have a view of the (snow-capped in August) Desolation Wilderness a hundred miles away. Farther up at the 6000-ft elevation, Placer County’s similar hilltop transfer station looks across at a ski area’s runs, in summer making paths down through the dense pines. No skiers there now. Those are all just avenues of tall grass.

Driving home, I know I’m coming back into my home place when the local radio (from, this week, a broadcast booth at the county fair) starts winning through the static and they’re plugging a local restaurant in the following terms: on a bicycle-powered blender, kids can provide the energy to make their own smoothies; and on Sunday evening the town’s poet laureate will be presiding at poetry-food pairings (I think the scheme is, she’ll be declaiming a poem while you, say, spoon up a compatible sherbet). O, my heart, more and more, is out at the transfer station. An insomniac man might use it as a technique for kidding himself to sleep: by just thinking of the transfer station at night, picturing it, gates closed, earth cooling by radiating, staff gone home, wind presiding.

* * * *

August 12, 2015

To Squaw for fall maintenance.

Confer with roofer about replacement of cedar shingles with composition.

Get all the aspen slash off the property. Two dump-trips, with branches piled hayrick-high and lashed down.

More sightings of mountain grouse. Bold, insouciant, strutting across path to the Annex without a ruffle or a scamper, as if tame around humans. Personally I want wild animals. I want shy animals. I’m not sure these cottontail bunnies and garden-deer and garbage-bears should be treating us trustingly, casually, meanwhile going off their natural feed.

Moral assumption: we (humans, skiers, novelists) are the “invasive species” par excellence. And when at last we’ve brought on our own extinction – our comeuppance – we want bears and hares to go on thriving independently as ever, freely.

* * * *

August 11, 2015

Silence of heat, August. Even the bees.

Very unproductive interval.

* * * *

August 11, 2015

Man stands in garden, morning. First sunlight hitting tops of tomato plants. The daily thunder of honeybees hasn’t yet begun. Coffee cup in one hand, with his free hand he harvests beans Blue Lake and haricots vertes: pendant long green commas, to be pinched off by thumbnail, one-handed, and slipped in jacket pocket. All the hens but one – (the broody stay-in-the-box girl never shows up for anything) – are milling around his ankles, done with celebrating their morning jailbreak and already settling down gouging dust-baths for themselves. They will have to be kicked out of the garden before they can wreck anything.

* * * *

August 8, 2015

Spray all new sprouts of blackberries with herbicide, perimeter of property, perimeter of house.

Six o’clock in the afternoon: the shade of the oaks has come over the vegetables, so Brett and Dash and I are out there weeding, the truck parked beside the fence, its radio broadcasting a “This American Life” episode.

The biome, the biome, and its “invasive” species. From the precise pH of my saliva to the salinity of the soil underfoot as it travels through worms’ guts, from the extinction of arctic polar bears to my own intestine’s bacteria flourishing in the dark a very cosmopolitan micro-civilization, from the prosperity of California eucalyptus trees in this century to the body-temperature regulation of the cottontail rabbits who are newly populating the (warmer now) upper elevations. The metaphor is: Thus surely there are incalculable but solid reasons for, say, the supremacy of the David Foster Wallace-type writer these days. It’s a phenomenon not to be too crudely analyzed. Brett, pulling up clumps of wild mint, says, “By the way, somebody cashed Alan’s honorarium check.” (Alan Cheuse) She’s pulling up the mint that has flourished so well in the accidental fertility of the raised beds. She adds, “It would have been riding in the car with him.”

* * * *

August 8, 2015

This is a peculiar millstone for me to be wearing these days (an invisible millstone and a not-too-heavy one): existential responsibility of having been the last of our tribe to say ’bye to Alan. After the post-conference board meeting, he’s tired and rumpled and happy, standing out at the curb on the shore of our vast empty parking lot, saying he’s looking forward to a long summer in the West, about to take the familiar drive to the beaches where his wife and friends wait. He was seventy-five, perpetually an unruly kid, perpetually of the New Yorky, contentious, rowdy school of literary criticism – and surely he was depending on his youthful ability, each summer, to make the drive from Squaw to Santa Cruz in a single shot without stopping. The board meeting ended at noon and it was maybe eight or ten hours later he lost control on 17 going over the Coast Range.

Craig and Sylvie to visit tonight to watch DVD of Diana’s movie. Stupidly I actually fall asleep during movie, and probably snore.

* * * *

August 3, 2015

No writing work today, nor for a the next couple of days. Rather, after summer’s absence, attention to everything broken and neglected around the acres; and freelance editing.

* * * *

August 1, 2015

Trying to write something for Alan’s passing to send to general Squaw population.

Our houseguests go to N. San Juan for wedding ceremony.

* * * *

Cleaned out studio trailer after summer absence. Rodents, caught by heavy traps’ zigzag jaws early in the summer, have sunk to pools of fluffy fur, the smell long-dissipated, as in the pharaohs’ sterile tombs.

* * * *

July 31, 2015

Peckinpah wedding is in town. Kristin stays in the cottage, Sam and his new wife Elisa in the playroom. Great evening at Genevieve’s bistro with Beaucoups Chapeaux, both sets fabulous.

* * * *

July 30, 2015

The sky over Squaw Valley at first light, many flights of wildfire-fighting aircraft (I guess their policy is not to fly till dawn, then get started in earnest) – lake-scooping planes, helicopters with pendulous buckets, C-130s, the kind referred to as VLAs, for “Very Large Aircraft.” All loading up in Lake Tahoe and flying NW – odd flight pattern – to fly away and douse the (now two) big fires in the foothills. I’m working upstairs, on couch, rather than at basement workbench, as I’m alone and the whole house is open to my slovenly rule.

Then – last day, I the last to leave the house – I pull in outdoor furniture and all the summer’s tools and playthings. Lock the doors and arm the anti-bear electricity. Over the summit, the drive home to the foothills is through smoky territory, and I see wildfire-precipitated rain falling over the (about four-thousand-foot elev.) hills. It’s falling as veils of virga that are curled sharply by wind shear. Then when I get there, it’s not virga, it’s a heavy rain. In a hectic bright silver cloud, all cars are slowed to a crawl, all windshield wipers are whacking at top speed.

Arriving at Nevada City elevation, I’m back in a cloudless, hot, still summer day. Brett is at a street fair in Grass Valley with Dash. Sands here makes eggplant confections for us all.

* * * *

July 29, 2015

Chores and fixes in Squaw. Fine day alone. Big spaces of silence around everything. On a hardware errand, I walk the length of Tahoe City among tourists, a ghost of my former self.

In the back of my mind always: How to resolve (or better, how to use) the central tone-discrepancy in “Things.” Meanwhile continuing to comb through “Immanence” bringing up characterization.

(That Yeats dictum about choosing “perfection of the life or of the art.” I guess I’m definitely earning my “art” – and plenty of the people I love are pitching in.)

Smoke in the valley. It’s from the canyon fires down by Dutch Flat. When a mountain grouse alights on the deck and stays a few minutes, big as a barnyard hen (an unusual sight in this sparse ecosystem) Brett suggests maybe the anomaly is a result of wildlife’s displacement by fires.

With Dash’s help, the dirt path gets tamped down (wrestling an ornery stamping machine by its horns). And, likewise with Dash’s indispensible bravery, the one remaining big old aspen that stands tall between two power lines is correctly felled – with some drama, because the directional cut bites down on the blade of my little electric chainsaw, and I have to make the felling cut with a pruning saw. Dash pulls distant guy, and the thing falls nicely without taking out any electrical wires. Then Brett and he, plus all pets, depart for Nevada City. I’m here with leftovers, loud music, wrap-up of this “Immanence” draft.

* * * *

Another afternoon taking out aspens by the road, heaping the slash up along the pavement for the county chipper.

* * * *

July 26, 2015

Barbara is gone now. Down in Nevada City in the care of daughters. Barbara despondent in the center of the party, and panicky, where did 1923 go? Hauled from party to party, Barbara, thou bookend now, thou paperweight, I can see that you alone know perfectly well that this airplane is over the ocean and all four engines are failing. You’re the only one in the room realizing it.

* * * *

July 25, 2015

Morning: On “Things,” emphasizing Heaven’s maleficence. And on “Immanence,” cutting back unreliable narrator.

(It’s been useful reading Ford Madox Ford’s “Good Soldier” this summer, whose unreliable narrator is annoying in places, especially in long woolgathering about character analysis. Such narrators are only interesting when they’re wrong/mistaken/deluded.)

Afternoon: Got a start taking out dense grove of aspens all along the road. There are dozens of dozens, from little sprouts to vigorous young trees. Working without any power tools, just the paleolothic-era pruning saw, curved and rip-toothed.

Dash is home from summer camp, taller, tawnier, tired. The sounds of his acoustic guitar inventions in the annex.

* * * *

July 24, 2015

The end of racism, on this lucky planet. On the radio, news of Obama’s visit to his home country, Kenya. All the while I’m loading firewood into annex woodbox. The historical fact of Obama’s presidency always makes me rejoice, dependably, no matter any other disappointments personal or global: that in my lifetime we got a president with some patent African blood is a bigger achievement, for my generation, than the moonshot or the personal computer. Because the human heart is a more intractable wilderness (than either of those two surfaces, lunar or silicon).

* * * *

July 22, 2015

Squaw valley is deserted at last. And after many days’ absence, I’m back in my bunker in the basement, leaving “Things” alone post-cuts, to try to look into “Immanence.”

All are gone now, the last two rolled down the hill with our standing and waving. Now it’s Brett and me and tranquility.

A Sisyphean afternoon on the steep slope, moving most of a cord of oak/pine mix from upper road to the Annex. My love of hard labor: it’s really almost an addiction, an escapism, a mysticism, a stupor.

After which, in great fatigue and aches, I go drinking with Eddy and Oswaldo at PlumpJack: the rattle of ice in the shaker: Pisco sours.

* * * *

July 21, 2015

Pacing up and down Columbus, and also Union, with cell phone to ear as if I were one of those people with Big Plans always forming – talking to lackadaisical staffer at investment house, about trusts. As Barbara’s cardiologist has begun to warn of mortality, Barbara may be getting sleepier and sleepier, unto death. So I have to inquire about her money, the little that’s left, whether it should be more liquid, for distribution, or less liquid, for investment. While I pace (Union, Stockton, Columbus: the streets form a triangle), I find underfoot (typical North Beach furnishing) a purple Crayola crayon, it’s lying on the sidewalk in front of the former Flor D’Italia place. Pick it up, of course: it’s the Purple Crayon from my nursery-book copy of Harold and the.

The Crayola however, I see, is identified on its paper skin as “BLUE,” not “PURPLE.” Still, in my world it will be the purple one, because I decree it.

* * * *

July 20, 2015

Hunter and Lindsay in SF. To the DeYoung for a show of remarkably unprepossessing Turner oils, and minor collection of early Diebenkorn prints. Then drive across GG bridge, up Lucas Valley Road, stop at Rancho Nicasio, then out to Marshall on the coast for barbecued oysters. Jan Buscho’s show of oils, all landscapes, happens to be opening, across the road from Tony’s Oysters. The coast road home is nauseating, dizzying.

Next morning, while Lindsay takes a job-interview call, Brett and Hunter and I go out for breakfast at Roma, then climb up to Coit Tower to view WPA murals.

* * * *

July 18, 2015

Learn of Alan’s car accident. The word is, they’d thought he was fine and were about to release him after a routine night’s observation in hospital. Then coma. Talk to Kris by cel phone, while riding on I-80 across the Sacramento valley. Trip to sf.

* * * *

July 16, 2015

Tennis, two sets with Andrew on Ancinas court.

Yet another tour of the Alpine premises. Trying to envision it as a Squaw venue.

Annual Dinner Out, with Lisa, Andrew, Kait.

* * * *

July 8, 2015

An evening reading: celebrities all brightly lit and amplified. Anne Lamott gives her usual well-worn monologue about jealousy, always hilarious. At finish, I slip out exit and drive home, stop in the depths of the big parking lot among dismantled ski-lifts. The sky: The last light of the starlit earth-atmosphere above Sierra is a pure blue of a Caribbean intensity, intense especially just above the western ridges of mountains.

“Red Dog Cantina”: The little saloon on the backside of the old A-frame is pumping out music, and for the first time I realize that that bar has been there forever, through all the vicissitudes. It is an ancient resident in the resort, apparently able to survive the revolutions in ownership. It’s been unchanged for thirty years, and probably so has been everybody inside there: unchanged. The neon beer signs’ lights artificial-flavoring colors (ruby, emerald, topaz) bleed into night air. Figures visible thru window: probably a game of pool: they have that shambling protocol. The same songs have been playing for thirty years:

I don’t care how much money I got to spend.

Got to get back to my baby.

Lonely days are gone,

I’m a-goin’ home.

My baby, she wrote me a letter.

Hey hey mama when I see you move,

Gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove.

Left a good job in the city, workin’ for the man every night and day.

But I never saw the good side of the city,

Till I hitched a ride on a river boat queen.

Outside a few pickup trucks are parked. Folks inside the Cantina: probably know each other well, all too well, and they have an agreement, never to wake up again. Beer and cigarettes and the same old songs, all designed to put them gently to sleep together. Here I am outside.

* * * *

July 6, 2015

Fiction program to begin today. Morning dawns clear. A week of cool drizzly weather is predicted.

First today, the hunt for some galvanized pipe at Squaw “Vehicle Maintenance,” necessary for hanging stage lights. I love soluble problems. I eat ’em up. Wish I had more of ’em.

* * * *

July 5, 2015

Fourth of July, one is grateful for this year’s absence of fireworks. Rain much of the day.

The usuals: the Millers and their macaroni salad; Nico and Ola; the Ancinases; a few Squaw interns. Much of the evening, at our end of the table, the Old Folks discuss the future of Squaw, pessimistically.

Sleepless night, almost literally. So that I’m lightheaded in the morning. Worries about everything, from Barbara to Dash, from our own going broke to Literature’s being bankrupt and tawdry. (Of course literature’s always been.)

* * * *

July 3, 2015

A mass excursion to little Independence Lake, north of Truckee – but Brett and I won’t go, feeling the pressure of work here. An editor cancels on account of death-in-family. The Squaw maintenance facility is all shut down (in observance of the Third of July), and so the Community of Writers has no resources for dressing performance spaces.

Good rains keep dousing the upper elevations, though down in Nevada City, rain never falls and the wildfire danger grows.

Then, later in day, we do knock off work and follow everybody up to the higher mountains. Secret lake is as big as Donner (almost) but totally unvisited by anybody, reachable by five miles of very rough rocky road. The Nature Conservancy has left kayaks out on the shore, for the use, gratis, of anybody who would like to borrow them.

* * * *

June 30, 2015

Again, dinner on the deck with all at the long table. And again, the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus. Tonight at last, the two planets occupy the exact same point in the sky, Venus upstaging Jupiter (and a bright little star “8 Leo” joining them).

During the very dark hour when the whole display is setting behind the western mountain, Barbara is beside me in a deck chair wrapped in blankets. Saying little, she does want to hold hands! She’s so confused, she hasn’t said anything all night. After a while remarks, in perplexed tone, as of a school science lesson she can’t recall, “There’s some connection between the heart and those stars.” For a long while the only sound is Andrew telling of the great days of driving out to the Nevada Test Site protests in the eighties. Barbara comments quietly, “In life, people have to have these conversations.”

* * * *

June 29, 2015

Afternoon clearing brush below Annex in great puffs of midday heat. Smells come back from the other years of cutting down high-elevation grass, juicy fat-stemmed shrubs, the woody thorn bushes, fine purple cheatgrass – smells of tea, of vitamins, of tobacco, aftershave, Moroccan-restaurant smells, birch smells of the school nurse’s office in 1961, of Lyman-Sargent’s drugstore downtown – all the while the weed-eater’s whipping strings making a repetitious snarl that, in auditory hallucination, begins to sound like Jimmy Cagney’s You-Dirty-Rat threats: “Mnyeah. Mnyeah. Mnyeahh.” My peculiar pleasure in working almost at the edge of heat stroke for hours.

Dinner of leftover curry at the upper house.

Off the deck, the beautiful display of Jupiter and Venus, a romantic pair above the mountain after sunset. They’ve been getting closer all month – and now look like a binary system, joined, too, by the mist we see them through, in this valley.

* * * *

June 28, 2015

Quiet Sunday in the valley, aftermath of first conference.

Dusty ground is damp from last night’s little rain.

The Tonkoviches will make their annual day trip – to Sierraville for spa.

The upper house, where I’m writing, is quiet. Barbara snoozes, and everybody but me has gone out somewhere. Last night’s pots and pans, post-merriment, are stacked high in the sink. Ping pong table dominates the living room. Cloth napkins lie on the slope below the deck, rained-on. In a soup-pot, an ice cream scoop is thrust deep into ice-cream-tinted water, where floats also an orange ping pong ball, wounded from maybe being stepped-on. Barbara, in the next room, the only life in the house, will go on sleeping till noon, at least.

Later in the day, soft rain settles in. Debilitating melancholy. The poets are gone, and there’s nothing very interesting to do.

* * * *

June 25, 2015

Morning, spent a short hour sealing over the big gash I took out of Book Three yesterday.

Then, at exactly “10:05 AM” (county government time), a public hearing in faraway King’s Beach, where the County “planning board” is to hear complaints about the ski-corp development in the valley, everybody getting his three minutes at the mic, some cogent, some sentimental or cranky. Beside me, the frowzy-looking guy in the “Keep Squaw True” T-shirt was scrolling through his iPhone screen checking his stocks’ prices via the live feed: some Upward/Green arrows, some Downward/Red arrows.

The same pair of golden eagles still nests in the rock face below Granite Chief. They seem larger this year (is that possible?), and of course older. Two days in a row I’ve been seeing them circling high. Not hunting, just spiraling higher. I suppose raptors’ shoulders have a lock-hinge, so they can hang on air-flow without tension.

Chopped out some Heaven from Book Three of “things” text – real damage, working on the book with sledgehammer and Saws-All – but then, having wrecked the last chapter, I have to stop, to play softball by the lake.

Dinner with Brett at PlumpJack, just her and me, in the bar corner in a lull.

* * * *

June 22, 2015

Done now with a draft of “Things” – all the more free of supernal scenes. Will let it rest unmolested for a day or two.

As an experiment, I’ve eliminated all supernal story entirely from Book Three, so its absence might hurt with an interesting ache.

* * * *

June 20, 2015

Day of poets’ arrival. Worked on my own all day, except for a visit to the center to secure the stage lights with heavy twine.

* * * *

St. John of the Cross, his wonderful (almost puerile? almost psychotic?) radicalism: the man was constantly holding up his empty cup:

“Live as though only God and yourself were in this world, so that your heart may not be detained by anything human.”

“One human thought alone is worth more than the entire world, hence God alone is worthy of it.”

* * * *

June 18, 2015

Dark-eyed junco, on the precise apex of roof-peak every sunset, singing a few minutes, then departing, that’s the routine, his summer of 2015.

Jupiter and Venus in conjunction all this month, moving ever closer together, Jupiter fainter tho’ it’s reputed to be huge, Venus brighter because she’s so much nearer. But they really look paired.

At last I catch a glimpse of the International Space Station. It moves as fast as a clock’s second-hand, and it’s as bright as any star. The impression is of a UFO, except that it’s ours.

* * * *

June 17, 2015

Andrew and Lisa are delayed.

But Hunter and Lindsay arrive, and they arrive just at a scene of absurdity. Joan Klaussen in thin floral frock (freckled, chapped, solid calves) turns up at our house, remembering it to be hers, and she is moving in – supplied with a paperback novel and some groceries and some junk mail, all in a SaveMart bag, and also a potted plant and today’s San Francisco Chronicle for her leisurely perusal. That she herself built this house fifty-some years ago does give her an inalienable right. Then Barbara appears, from her perpetual nap, and the two old friends share intelligence – Barbara’s about certain mysterious, audible people in the basement, Joan’s about the mistaken “renters” who have occupied “her” house – and they can agree the world has gone to hell in a handbasket. Barbara waves, going back to bed, “Well, I hope they catch him.”

* * * *

June 16, 2015

Today, another car trip to N.C., this time for Dashiell’s concert.

All this week of our installation in Squaw quarters, I’m debilitated by a total backache. Which is a kind of sneaky pleasure not only because it guarantees me a 4F exemption from some of the labor of moving in, I also am evicted from my body, its trusty responses, and everything seems to involve more care and consideration and even sentiment.

* * * *

June 15, 2015

Preparations for conference. Forced hiatus from writing for a day or two.

Yesterday: woke up at four and worked out the entire participant portion of workshop schedule, then went down to the offices and built the entire bookstore enclosure, then came home and elaborately cooked ribs for arrival of Tracy and Jim.

This morning (with backache straitjacket) must drive to Nevada City for Dashiell’s concert rehearsals.

One thing here always makes me pause on the path in (the thing that’s always good for you) gratitude: spring-water’s gurgle below the roadside on the path down to the annex, faintly audible behind the steel garbage house and the willows: no matter the season, that stream always gives water at the same quiet rate.

* * * *

June 11, 2015

Back at work already. Space heater beside me.

I realize, all the more, that this lustrous book “All Things” is frankly mystical. Of course “enlightenment” doesn’t come to a rational mind, but maybe sometimes it can be constructed in the artificial medium of prose.

* * * *

June 11, 2015

In Squaw now permanently for summer.

Clear out basement. Set up workshops schedule.

* * * *

Unsettling thought:

All these years I’ve liked to think of myself as, at least ideally, in the “truth-and-beauty” business. That’s what I’ve said. Wanting to see that Grecian urn (or marble statue) as an aspiration far above the entertainment marketplace.

Today, during a metaphysical passage in the upper-tier narrative of “angels,” I found myself writing the following evaluation of mortal earthly ethics:
“But beauty is not Justice. Nor is beauty truth.”

Well, maybe the truth-beauty mash-up will always be a compromise, not a union. That is, truth be compromised, beauty be compromised.

* * * *

June 10, 2015

Sands and I: dinner in the cottage with Barbara, disagreeing over St. Paul.

* * * *

Home alone on the farm these days, doing last cleanup, pottering.

Where Pancho’s weedwhacker exposed the midden that was once an old sandbox, a few rusty steel trucks and dismembered action figures are embedded.

Dash is mostly away this summer, on a string of sleep-overs and summer-camp visits; Hunter is in Baltimore but will be visiting, to work at Squaw, and to get his ancient car, stuck under the pear tree, running and out of here. Must remember to set up a “starter” IRA account for him while he’s here.

In the smallest of the three bedrooms here, where in the mornings I’ve been writing, there’s a small soft-rubber disk on the shelf: it’s like the plug from the underside hole of a salt-shaker. I realize it’s what’s left of a piggy bank. There were two different piggy banks in this house that I can remember – one a garish kitschy ceramic Elvis-chimpanzee on a surfboard, the other a conventional pink pig. I of course haven’t seen them for years, haven’t thought of them, their shards are long since evacuated, their treasure distributed in the world, but here still is the plug.

* * * *

Return to Nevada City for house shut-down and a bit of alone time.

Repair the mowing deck myself, lying out in the meadow on my back under those scary blades. Tremendous satisfaction in acquiring skills outside my repertoire.

* * * *

Apparently now my thinking abilities are at last leaving. At Squaw Annex, the swamp cooler feed-tube under the deck is spraying a feather of water from a pinhole. But that tube shouldn’t even be getting any water pressure, because I routinely shut it down in November before the snow flies. Now it’s June, the grass is tall and tender, and the water pressure has somehow obviously been on for some while. A hard freeze in the winter might have been catastrophic. It’s just an insoluble mystery. The years do blend together so the old monk has no specific memory of turning off that water; but still, it’s an infallible axiom, that he would never skip anything so important in the autumn shut-down. So it’s just a mystery.

* * * *

June 7, 2015

To Squaw delivering office-equipment crap and installing the family there.

Now the Indian Flat house, over the last week, has had a real “haircut” and looks younger. (thanks to the Nevada County Fire Safe Council.)

It has “curb appeal” as we drive away. Which I dislike.

* * * *

June 6, 2015

Saturday. Slept in, with no intention of working.

Mowed all of south and east meadows. Chopped out stumps, consolidated firewood. Pancho again today, clearing weeds around entire henhouse-pumphouse area. For the first time in a decade, all that field of thriving wild sweet pea is leveled. (This software insists on SpellChecking my syntax and won’t let sweetpea be a single word, so “wild” and “sweet” are just going to have to go together as separate adjectives. Which is definitely tolerable.)

At this point in the season, mowing meadows is epic, they’re so tall. A true wall of weeds (Red Sea parting) stands beside me while I’m laying down swaths, destroying ecosystems where I pass. Inhabitants scatter before me. Weirdly exhausting to the driver, the man mowing. A half gallon of lemonade goes down the hatch. All the work today is probably not a good prelude to the dinner show tonight with Randy and Sands, where I’ll be instanced as an old tired guitarist, brokeback from sitting in the throes of the mower’s tossing saddle.

* * * *

The French as epigrammatists. Genevieve is at the show, and asks of my writing. I tell her, well, in her native country it actually means something to be a writer. As a way of oversimplifying the remark, ESL-style, I tell her, “It’s hard to be a writer in France!” (the point being, it’s so all-too-easy here in the New World – and the point being, too, that the French have reasons to actually respect their writers). Genevieve’s riposte: “It’s hard to be anything in France.”

* * * *

Repaired mysterious clank in swamp cooler (simply by removing, then replacing, the side panels).

Completely cleaned chicken premises.

Brett does all planting of summer crops.

* * * *

June 4, 2015

Hired man does defensible-space clearing around house all day, raking and pruning.

Myself, I had a prodigiously efficient day. Lots of work on “Things.” The garden’s main area got turned over and fertilized with chicken manure. Leak-repairs to trailer. Turn soil in new-enclosed garden area and mix manure/compost.

* * * *

June 3, 2015

Breaking ground in main section of garden: a late start on the usual summer crops.

Music in the cottage.

* * * *

June 2, 2015

More simplifying “Things.”

Dentist.

Two dilapidated bicycles to bike shop for reconditioning.

Afternoon in the fallow garden, where my enemies are blackberry, mint, wort.

* * * *

June 1, 2015

In morning dusk, the birds are singing in the cedars, the dogwood, the mulberry, the tall box hedges. Galvanized pail clank. Barley fodder dripping but silently, garden irrigation hissing.

In all the days after somebody dies, the birds go on with their morning songs as usual, and Gill is one more example. Me too. After I die, there will come a morning when the birds are singing in my absence. You’ll be there for it.

* * * *

My own car to mechanic for oil-and-filter.

Molly the house sitter comes by for the proprietary tour. Hike up to the weir, walk along the ditch in shady sun, water flowing along beside looks brass in the shade.

Set up an IRA for Hunter.

Jam with Randy at Sands’s.

* * * *

May 31, 2015

Sunday. I think today is the first in a long time when I haven’t put in some hours of physical labor. It a principle worth bearing in mind, how healthy it can be not to get exercise.

Music, rehearsing with Sands in mud room while Barbara dozes in the wing chair, cold Ovaltine at her side. More of guitar than Dobro.

Our summer house-sitters arrive to stow their chattel in the garage. “U-Haul” truck in driveway: the peace and quiet of this place is shattered by how colorful is the advertising on a U-Haul truck’s side panels.

The broccoli is coming in, in abundance, so tonight it’s stir-fry. And a slug from a bottle of sugary “Panda Express” stir-fry sauce that came our way.

Later in the evening, I’m notified by my phone, with a buzz, that the International Space Station is going to be visible at 10:01 rising like a star – (but rising in the southwest, unlike any star or any celestial body). So I go outside, wearing new-prescription glasses, but I get distracted, and by the time I’ve put the hens’ food-bucket up and collected eggs, the Space Station has passed overhead and dropped below the other (the northeast) horizon.

Amazing thing: the astronomical laws that govern the deepest, remotest phenomena are cognizable to the human brain.

The laws that governed stars’ first swirlings 14 billion years ago (or similarly, the laws that make “solid matter” a tangible substance, at my alien fingertip) can be conceived by a brain, a neuronal mass at the top of a recently evolved brain stem that is ruled, also, by compulsions of sex-and-violence. Laws of ironclad infallible universal magic have been written down by the same mind that forgets where the coffee cup was last set down.

There is absolutely no warrant for this coincidence, that objective reality answers our designs. One needn’t conclude there are religious implications, only that it’s wonderful, which is religion enough.

* * * *

May 30, 2015

On “Things”: Reducing “spiky extremes” in the hints I’ve added in soteriological themes.

At this house today arrives really glamorous “Washer-Dryer Combination.” I’ve resisted this manfully and lost. The old heavy-gauge-steel washer and dryer went out the door on a hand truck, trailing lint – and I know that the metals get “recycled,” and I know that the new models are supposed to be “green” in the sense that they use less water and power – but still I can’t help but think that those are only minor mitigations in the total carbon-footprint environmental damage of fresh manufacture. Making the old jalopies last a few extra years seems more small-carbon-footprint. The old ones were fine. No computers to break down. Just rubber belts sometimes to be replaced, like maybe every ten yrs.

Work out at club.

Evening dinner-show, where a friend of Dashiell’s has the mic. Singer-songwriter.

* * * *

May 25, 2015

Begin again on review of “Things” with its new (more unmistakable and concise) theme signposts.

Memorial Day holiday.

Spent much of the afternoon mending old hoses, investigating inefficiencies.

(In bad fire-season to come, repairs I have ignored for years take on a little urgency. Like getting the meadows better irrigated.)

Salmon with miso and ginger is not much of a success.

* * * *

A basic pleasure. After 25 years of marriage (it occurs to me) I have a happy wife.

She’s in the living room, having set up her printer to reproduce a wide-format photo of hers (sleeping dog on kitchen rug, as reflected in the chromy bulge of a Dobro’s nickel plating). Her cat is sleeping on the arm of the couch, dog is at her feet, her writers conference isn’t headed for disaster financial or logistical, her husband is poking at the salmon as it roasts, her second son somewhere in the house. It’s something of an achievement, having a contented woman. I guess it has to happen by accident, but it’s a happy accident.

* * * *

May 24, 2015

Wake up and go over Wendy’s edits for a Threepenny piece, which are great.

Refrain, yet, from going back into any serious work on fiction.

Then: yet more brush clearing. A crazy amount of time is required just in keeping a country place habitable and safe. There are things I’ve been putting off for years. Plus, I’ll be gone all summer.

Brett’s decade-long campaign for a new washing machine: In my stinginess I could go on forever with the old one.

* * * *

May 23, 2015

A little light rain this morning. Done by dawn.

The Threepenny Review will buy my thousand-word complaint about consumerism.

Misc. reflection as I’ve survived long enough to have some some regrets: Those who have found a way to forgive me my mistakes may have done so easily and lightly or may have worked their way around to it, but none will have had such work as I will have in self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness is the real row-to-hoe.

* * * *

May 22, 2015

Grey skies are bulging. Rain is promised, then withheld.

I’m not writing. Will devote myself to all inevitable springtime chores, waiting for the courage or impatience to start sending the work out again.

* * * *

For days now I’ve been clearing brush in a particular area that happens to include a high-traffic beehive. They and I are coexisting well. Where I’ve been parking the truck for slash transport, their hive is beside the front tire – and the crowd at its doorway is always like a Bloomingdale’s entrance. During these days of work, I’ve loomed in their sight (in the sight of their convex, goggly, ultraviolet-sensitive, compound eyes; and in the shared, collective evaluation of their entire swarm’s ethical consciousness), where I’ve existed as a pixilated ghostly shape – I’m not a flower; I’m more like a deer, or swaying hawthorn, or a coyote, lacking pollen, lacking nectar, so I’m as useless as a cloud, and as negligible.

* * * *

Reading Flaubert again. His mastery of the perfect nailing detail, to display how pathetic and vulgar are the shitty little people he invented. I’m finding all Flaubert’s authorial contempt instantly distasteful, as if somebody around me started making racist remarks. (For some reason now, it’s more protrusive in the sight of the attentive reader, and more damaging to the narration.)

* * * *

May 21, 2015

Chamber Choir performs “Red Pickup” lyrics.

Beer afterward, mutually congratulatory, with composer Mark.

* * * *

May 17, 2015

Sunday. Brett and I will drive up to Squaw to meet with Tamara to agree, by pointing literally at a spot on the ground, where her property shall end, and ours begin.

Dash will be in San Francisco all day at a “Maker’s Faire,” presumably watching bots solve Rubik’s Cubes, and welded-together fire-breathing junk heaps do battle. Midmorning, I’m in kitchen taking a break, scraping very old hard brie onto bread while the kitchen radio (perpetually NPR) broadcasts an interview with a woman who has written an autobiography: her memory had always failed her, then at last an MRI scan revealed she’d always had a hole in her brain, an empty void the size of a lemon. When she’s in the supermarket, she can never remember where the peanut butter is shelved. My coffee is replenished, and it’s time for me to go back behind my closed door, to my morning’s work with these grammatical sentences’ technology, setting subjects before verbs, squeezing in clauses, adjectives, adverbs. Suddenly, across the kitchen, with a soft ding, an electronic female voice says cheerfully, equably, “No, I didn’t think so.” It’s my cell phone. It was the voice of Siri – who seems to have been left on, listening, and she was responding, apparently, to some remark on the radio. I put her back to sleep before going to work.

* * * *

Squaw. We agree that the McKinney property meets ours at a particular clump of cattails by the roadside. (For a better monument, I hammer a stick of iron rebar there, using a rock.)

Nice, late lunch at PlumpJack – split a cheeseburger, plus zinfandel – after a short walk under overcast sky up to the first waterfall.

* * * *

May 15, 2015

Sands’s concert at Nevada Theatre. Working with good musicians is a great ride.

* * * *

FRAGMENTS:

A man in a city goes into a building for some assignation — he’s having an affair or something. Three hours later he emerges, heads for his parked car, and on approach realizes his car keys aren’t in his pocket. Then, as panic is just rising, he realizes his car’s engine is running. He left it like that, keys in ignition, unlocked, and all the while on a city street, it was untouched.

A minor but “gatekeeper” figure in a story is working a paperback puzzle book, distracting himself. It’s called Amazing Mazes. His pencil travels carefully.

A “mistress” or a “kept woman” is going to have many advantages, and among them is the fact that she’s not going to respect the man she’s seduced. She’s not going to want him.

* * * *

May 14, 2015

Work on Assistant, limiting discursion.

Defensible-space cutting around house and below the cottage in the woods.

“Visiting Composers” concert at Besemer House.

* * * *

News that Gill has died. (Of a stroke or heart attack at home watching the ball game, sitting in his armchair.)

* * * *

May 13, 2015

Wake early on San Francisco couch. Coffee at Peets.

Then drive to Mill Valley for proper roll-and-coffee on the square. Sleepy bourgeois suburb now. My own photo has fallen off the wall in the bookstore. By the shady creek behind Mill Valley Market: a big snowy egret is roosting on a post, takes off towards Mt. Tam.

Nice party for Counterpoint authors. Editors at the party: I used to think (in the days when I couldn’t get published) that editors were powerful people. Now I know they’re the most vulnerable, the most at risk. Who here is “the snowball in hell”?

Nice long drive home, burning local-manufacture vegetable oil, rate of consumption seems to be 30mpg. I stop in Colfax to pick up train schedule, for my next trip into town. (News: during the entire month of March, world ppm of CO2 was 400. This is a milestone. Also, other news, rate of ocean acidification is 5% increase per decade.)

* * * *

May 12, 2015

To SF, for Bar Agricola for Counterpoint Press.

* * * *

Billy on his deathbed yesterday, speaking of a wildfire presently burning on ranch property of his in Mooney Flat.

* * * *

May 10, 2015

Mothers Day will go uncelebrated here. Too busy with drama of Squaw acceptance/rejection. One day a year, this has to happen.

Last night, lots of restlessness in the cottage. In the night, Barbara had risen up and collected all her necklaces, hidden them under her pillow, then set out to walk to Squaw Valley.

Tonight, more music with Sands and the Luke/Maggie ensemble, at Sands’s house, then dinner.

* * * *

Happy to have gone back to rereading Flaubert. Somebody who writes as if something matters.

But this second time around, I see I’ve grown a new moral sense, a sense of how the world works, and something I hadn’t seen in Flaubert bothers me: that he has perfected the “Amusement at the Foibles of the Stupid” enjoyment. It’s a kind of readerly pleasure, I guess, that can be licensed especially since the Stupid aren’t present to sense my superiority. But it’s not a kind of writing I could do anymore. I have to keep the mark higher, and in the end, I hate to say it of Flaubert, but it’s a cheap trick and he largely depends on it, and I think maybe his reputation is way too inflated. His style, even, yes, Flaubert’s style, is undistinguished and marred by, no kidding, inattention.

* * * *

May 9, 2015

Brett has all the pages of applicants’ names fanned out on the big table covering it like shingles.

To Amy and Luke’s, with Gordon on banjo. This time pedal-steel.

* * * *

May 8, 2015

More clearing “defensible space.”

* * * *

May 7, 2015

At last, two years’ firewood supply (softwood anyway) is collected in a solid stack, size of a VW bus, below the cottage, a loaf there.

Pickup is parked in the grass below the cottage, where all the cedar stovewood is collecting in a big three-cord stack, heat for the winter of 2017, certain split logs’ woodgrain, in the sun, impossibly silk-faceted where the split was flat and pure.

Spent first half of day on “Assistant,” stirring deeper into the discursive sections.

Missed the rehearsal up the hill at Sol Rayo studio.

Dinner of pesto. Mushroom/spinach/onion sauté. Feta cheese.

Dinner was delayed for thirty minutes while Brett made an emergency trip to the “wildlife rescue lady” on Willow Valley Road, carrying a fledgling (red-capped finch) in a Kleen-Ex box. The housecats had mauled the bird but he was still breathing.

Then when she got back from creature-hospital, the report on the radio was about Israeli soldiers’ new confessions of atrocities Operation Protective Edge. In one ear I was hearing of the lop-tail squirrel recuperating, and the orphaned baby robins that had arrived in a Walmart basket, and the woman in charge of them all, on Willow Valley Road, who, in her garage establishment, holds wriggling mealworms out over baby robins with tweezers, the woman’s “patient” husband who cooking dinner all the while, the way the baby birds open wide their big mouth-hole origami and demand to be the first fed, and all the other wounded creatures in this woman’s garage getting help; and in the other ear I was hearing the reports of IDF soldiers who’d been told to open fire with automatic weaponry and armor-piercing tank missiles on all Palestinian civilians, no matter the age or gender, in any neighborhood. (Especially anybody standing indoors near a window. Especially fire on them. Because if they were innocent they wouldn’t be standing near a window.)

* * * *

May 5, 2015

Up very early again, working again on “Assistant” (the extremely discursive version).

Been back to regular meditation, too, for some while.

A very happy productive day. Limbed trees around house as per instructions of Cal Fire inspectors, then at nightfall played dobro while, in the ticking stove beside me, a cheap pork roast, in crust of fennel seeds, cooked real slow.

* * * *

May 3, 2015

Sunday.

Finish with quick assessment of Immanence.

Revisions to Squaw schedule.

Another load firewood, from meadow to house.

With loppers and commercial poison and pruning saw, removing hawthorn and sweet pea and blackberry all over the property.

* * * *

May 2, 2015

Move firewood up from lower meadow to new stack for next winter by the plum tree, with Dashiell’s help.

Nice two-hour performance with Randy and Sands in the evening. Well attended.

* * * *

April 30, 2015

Immanence.

Visit from Cal Fire: Lots of defensible-space requirements.

At last, the final coat of white paint on the garage door’s bear-damaged frame.

A trip in the pickup, all over hell and gone (Dog Bar Road), to buy a “lift” armchair for Billy – it rises and then dumps forward – as Billy can walk but has been unable to get up out of a chair.

* * * *

April 29, 2015

(At murkiest dawn the trill of juncos, answering each other from separate trees – the mulberry by the gate and the hawthorn by the potting shed.)

Immanence.

Again, Sands for music.

* * * *

April 28, 2015

To take a break from the newly scored “Things” I’m going back to Immanence. Peculiar narrative.

Sands here for music in the afternoon.

Doctor appointment. Now the remedy for sore throat is antihistamines.

* * * *

April 27, 2015

Working on “Things,” its “angelic mischief” areas, and also adding a strictly explanatory passage about the quid-pro-quo of apocatastasis. Which seems necessary.

Squaw deskwork. Then more Squaw deskwork. Then the result of my work goes to the post office branch in the grocery store. So a day is spent productively or lost in busywork.

I have to cool my heels for an hour. Drink a small, sour, dark beer at brewery, reading Junot Diaz.

Finish mowing most of the big south meadow.

* * * *

April 26, 2015

Breakfast at Tofanelli’s with the author of the novel the local play was based on.

Then, stranded in Grass Valley with an hour to kill, I get capp and read Junot Diaz.

Nice long, wide-ranging sidewalk conversation with Cavendish. (“What does the Deadhead say when he comes down off acid? Jeez! This band is awful!”)

Walking across Main Street at a red light, I notice the hood of the Toyota I’m passing, where inscribed in a decal above the grill is Euler’s Equation:

Dinner after: Jennie Michaels, Paul Emery, Cavendish: they represent a good quorum of the town’s angels.

* * * *

April 25, 2015

We went and visited Billy down the road, bodhisattva of Indian Flat, he is in a bad way. Tumors are everywhere, and he isn’t getting out of his armchair anymore. Hinduism and lots of marijuana, that’s what he’s got. Without Billy around, a lot of us will feel more vulnerable to the myriad snafus of life.

Back home, big pot of gumbo, and Josh and Jen came over, with new baby Cody.

* * * *

April 24, 2015

Steve Susoyev to arrive for discussion of “Things.” Will spend the night in the cottage.

* * * *

April 22, 2015

Happiness of being alone in San Francisco. Cappuccino and pastry at Roma. Bump into Ola on the Macondray steps. Work in the morning. Lunch with Jason in Sausalito.

Stay on after lunch, then. Alone in Sausalito – on little warm sunny Caledonia – for 4:00 showing of a documentary at the Marin. I’m the only person in the black-box screening.

(“The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.” Wm. Hazlitt.)

* * * *

The quiet end of Sausalito. I’ve always loved how the streets slope down to reach their end at saltwater-level. Pine Street, Turney Street. An unguarded stony margin there, the stillness of Richardson Bay.

Crossing the GG Bridge for the zillionth time in my life:

“”Nirvana” and “samsara” are the same state” – it does get at the heart of something.

* * * *

April 21, 2015

To San Francisco for Nan’s memorial at the DeYoung. Saw everybody. David Perlman.

* * * *

April 20, 2015

Darkness falls: the allowable time of day for wine. The Grocery Outlet cabernet. Garlic and shallots in pan, where salmon will land. Big pot of water for noodles isn’t boiling yet.

The immanence of “sin” in the world: Sin is quite indispensable: I’m looking out at the meadow in a last, dim, declining hour when all creatures are getting shelter – (except, maybe, for the opportunists of night, who have their own kind of happiness) – while on the kitchen radio is report after report about the deaths of human multitudes this week. Refugees everywhere try, by land and by sea, to make the trip from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern, all around the rim of the world dying in the effort, drowning off the shores of Europe as they flee Africa, thirsting in the Arizona desert.

Of the 800 today who drowned in the Mediterranean, most were locked into the lower decks of the little ship.

The geopolitical web is impossible to untangle – and the mixture of happenstance and skill (or selfish wiliness) that landed me where I am – it is all too imponderable – but I’ve got a feeling that the bad luck of North Africans and Nicaraguans has some (if remote) cause-effect relationship with my comfort in this quiet place. More specifically, I get the feeling that one point-of-contact between us is the portfolio of stocks in my little SEP-IRA, which is balanced, balanced according to a low-risk algorithm among growth stocks and value stocks, bonds and cash, domestic markets, foreign markets, emerging markets, multinationals. All for a one-percent fee. Meanwhile I look out over the deepening peaceful meadows.

* * * *

April 19, 2015

Nevada Irrigation District opens weir this week, belatedly.

Springtime Sunday.

Brett’s clean-up of winter-cluttered garage. The removal of all storm windows, upstairs and down, the unshrouding of swamp cooler, the reawakening of both evap-cooler systems – all this is catastrophic to peaceful colonies of wasps, who’d just been getting a start.

Caulk on bear-damaged garage door.

* * * *

April 18, 2015

Saturday. To Sacramento for board meeting.

* * * *

April 15, 2015

Still lots of Squaw work and none of my own.

Reframing and primer-painting garage door that was torn up by bear.

(I’d procrastinated in this, reasonably. Before restoring it, I wanted to wait to see if he’d be back soon to wreak the same damage all over again.)

First mowing of especially tall patches of meadows – not yet entirety.

The peculiarity of cooking from live gardens is that recipes are unrepeatable and accidental. Little lucky masterpieces turn out to have depended on what happened to be in the kitchen, what’s in season, and what resourcefulness comes up. This lamb stew will never be reprised.

*

April 13, 2015

Early plantings worked well. Already we’re living on onions and lettuce. Reinstate routine of barley-fodder watering. Pullets are laying.

Inevitable flood of Squaw work. All this week, my time is not my own. Brett keeps picking over balance sheets with a highlighter pen.

* * * *

April 9, 2015

Back home. The usual grief (over not living in San Francisco) burns off like morning dew.

Pear crop seems to have been slightly damaged by frost – (just about exactly decimated (i.e., one-tenth-reduced) seems would be the word). But the new Bartletts are coming on strong.

Good little rain, for two days.

Finished with “Varney’s Hardware” editorial.

* * * *

April 6, 2015

Drive out to West Marin, Brit food at the Pelican Inn, then Muir Woods. Bump into Dan Bellm and Yoel Kahn.

* * * *

April 4, 2015

To George Khouri’s house in Fairfax, to see oud. I don’t make an offer.

To Chris’s, deeper in Fairfax, to record dobro part for “Rodeo Girl.”

Dash comes along and, meanwhile, spends four hours in Fairfax alone as boulevardier, with novel to read and pocketful of coffee money.

* * * *

April 3, 2015

Pleasures of morning trip along Polk Street for hardware-and-charcuterie.

Lunch with LitQuake people.

Dinner, just the three of us, at Aux Delices on Polk. Then an oddball indie movie with Dash, at home on DVD.

* * * *

April 2, 2015

Going down the steep slope of Union Street before light. Caffe Trieste.

Later: the drab, dreamy, sunny neighborhoods of the Richmond District, looking for a card shop in which Dash can make a purchase, just any purchase. Failure.

Baker Beach, with dog.

The DeYoung Museum: Scottish show including Vermeer’s big picture of Christ adjudicating btw Martha and Mary, Botticelli’s lovely baby Jesus at Virgin’s knee, a sweet Corot of a shady road into the forest.

* * * *

March 31, 2015

Miscellaneous writing and deskwork.

Establish real system for chicken-manure composting, which up till now I’ve been treating in a half-assed way.

Two bales straw at Ridge Feed.

Chicken sausages and kale and polenta.

(While I shoveled chicken manure today, I listened on my iPhone ear buds to a BBC podcast, part of a series about “the elements.” This one focused on phosphorus. The world supply is being quick-depleted; it’s a fertilizer, so in a decade the price has quintupled. And I felt very clever to be shoveling chicken shit on my own acres.)

* * * *

Brett’s little plant-nursery – actually extensive nursery – in this frosty season moves in and out of the mudroom daily, nightly.

Tomatoes, squash, cucumber, lots of different beans, all little pale curls in separate dollops of soil.

Poetry keeps arriving here from all over the country, this is the season, March-April, and Brett sorts it, tags it, moves it on.

Spring break from school, Dashiell is home, always in pajamas, preferring darkened rooms with shades drawn, face aglow in light of his Kindle or his iPad.

New pullets still aren’t laying, still.

Brett, standing up over her garden-drip-irrigation work, fists on hips, calling across to me: “Is it just a world full of unhappy people trying to work with Chinese-made crap?”

* * * *

March 30, 2015

Done with my little screed about consumerism.

A doctor’s appointment for Dash, to have his smooshed toe checked on.

The same day, my own doctor’s apptmnt: chronic throat pain.

On the radio, an anthropologist is talking about how “play” consists in a wonderful tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity that, other times, would be intolerable. Well, even Cancer could be a kind of game.

On the novel All Things I’ve been amping up “the Lord’s work,” i.e., the Lord’s mischief.

Great peaceful afternoon. Dash writing piano-cello piece on mudroom piano. Both cats doze on shed roof. On our quiet road, a guy drives by with his window open, alone in the car shouting, “Help me! Help me! Help me!” Keeps on going, around the bend, headed north.

* * * *

March 29, 2015

Start broccoli and Brussels sprouts, raised beds.

Soil prepared under hogwire arch.

All St. John’s wort attacked with Ortho product (8% triclopyr).

Sands’s good set at the winery with Randy, followed by Sol and Elena Rayo, their tight collaboration.

Then Sands for dinner, pesto in Barbara’s cottage.

* * * *

March 28, 2015

More of these unrealistic sunny days.

Soil prep in garden.

More playing with “editorial” (about consumerism and environment).

My heavy-duty rat trap, in the trailer, seems to have caught a wood rat several days ago, big fellow, but by the tail somehow. So he dragged the trap after himself and plunged behind the defunct fridge, the trap itself snagging above, so eventually he got hanged for a few days by his tail, dying. I open the outer-wall access door to find him today, still hanging, now ripe, shimmering with maggots, they drip in clumps, so I use garden loppers to disconnect him from his tail and let him drop.

The pears, meanwhile, have germinated perfectly in these weirdly ideal fruit-growing conditions, and we will have an abundance in the fall. Every blossom-stem is now swelling with an incipient pear – no, an actual pear, already big-as-a-pea standing up erect.

End of day, where’s Brett? I find her in the darkened living room dozing solidly at ten pm, her round face lit by iPad screen, deep asleep over the podcast of a BBC radio show, about end-of-life “palliative” care for the elderly and the hard choices there, which plays on and on as she sleeps.

* * * *

March 27, 2015

Nights of alert, elated wakefulness. The pleasure of being the only spark of consciousness in all these North American woods in the dark. Coffee and meditation.

How “the hard problem” (of neuroscience) is just a fizz.

The insomniac radio shows from Europe.

“All Things” is at its standstill. I play around with an editorial that equates stinginess with environmental probity. (Where to publish?) The clanging silence all night alone.

* * * *

March 21, 201

Dashiell’s having badly banged his toe – (under a heavy recycling bin in the garage) – has set the tone around here for recent days. Doctor visits, X-rays, administration of painkillers and invalid lunches. He’s lurching around here in pain and discomfort.

Brett to Sacramento, for accountant visit.

Sands in the cottage with her mother, I cutting oak by the potting shed: the old shrewd convenience of using a pickup’s tailgate as a sawbuck.

* * * *

March 18, 2015

Today begins another slog through “Things.” Unmarketable book that it is, I love it and insist on it. A few ideas for making the supernal plot into a more gettable joke for the reader. But in all honesty I don’t want to do much more to it. I think it’s what I want it to be.

* * * *

March 17, 2015

Another day of cooling my heels, staying away from work.

Sent off critique to Kim, sketched a sentence or two for Elizabeth blurb, drove Dash to school and then sat on Hospital Hilltop contemplating Things, thinking I like it as it is.

The trout got smoked, and leeks-and-parsnips roasted, while from a fat dowel of maple I found, I honed two wooden cork shapes (a little bit of a taper), to bung the holes in the floor behind the stove.

Garden: soil amendment. But we lack organic fertilizer, and I haven’t composted the chicken manure correctly.

* * * *

March 15, 2015

Saw to SPD saw shop.

* * * *

March 14, 2015

Overcast Saturday. Another day of no writing, I’ve been living instead like a country gentleman: cutting out cedar stumps in the morning, reading Elizabeth’s really good galleys in the noontime sun lawn chair, cutting oak cordwood, bringing up all the old websites about McTaggart’s Unreality-of-Time essay and the relativistic “block” theories. I keep going back, keep drinking the same water.

Moved cut oak up behind cottage for splitting.

Finished cedar stump removal.

Pulled gorse in clearing.

Wore the chainsaw out on the big oak taken down last spring by PG&E in the woods. (All the while, close beside me, the old mare in the glade went on grazing unperturbed by chainsaw. Could she be deaf?)

Today Brett will get her mind off the chronic sorrows of Squaw Valley logistics by working outside. Plantings in enclosed garden, with the iPod playing “On the Media” episodes. Me, I feel great because the loan-refinance on the Macondray Lane house will close – (notary public to arrive here on Monday with papers) – and I feel I’ve accomplished something prudent and difficult and — not least — cunning.

Dash and the whole rock band have gone to friend’s house. Keeping their boys out of downtown is a mildly diverting activity for parents, only faintly strategic. All the ragamuffins from the Ridge, whose parents are home stoned, are out on the town stoned, on the sidewalks before Mekka and Pete’s Pizza, where they create an atmosphere of lax Purgatory, or Limbo. Nevada City will never outlive its reputation for allowing open alcohol containers, countenancing R-rated bacchanalia in the streets. Dash’s sophomore drummer friend, Mike, has the good luck to live with his family in an old Victorian directly on the main street, within walking distance of everything. The only circumstance requiring patience, sometimes, is that Mike’s house is where kids go when they need to lie down.

(For this reason, those parents are planning a sale of the house and a move to the country.)

* * * *

March 12, 2015

Up before light, watering the hens.

Saturn and the half-moon are side by side, as close-together as a smile and a dimple. Those two are the only visible objects in the whole expanse as the dawn is getting a start.

Squaw Valley work tends to predominate. Get the stove going in the front of the house, for a change.

My own work is stalled and amounts to mere moping, and abject moping. I can’t seem to reconcile the two stories of “Things,” the comedy of metaphysical sections with the empathy of its earth narrative. Lots of sitting outside the trailer.

Long hike through the old Erikson Lumber property. Now there is a groomed trail, but when there were no trails it used to be much more dramatic and intimate, sweaty, itchy, bamboozling, great-smelling, a home to animals you had to respect.

Little rain is coming in. The day got greyer and quieter, and vaguer, till the only thing that was specific was two crows, cawing, flying over my head where I read in a chair in the meadow.

* * * *

What is a “content provider” (myself) to make of his role? This is a world where culture is purchased and retailed on a mass scale, dominated by a certain American, seductive, charming simplicity. (The fundamentalist terrorists in Syria – so-called Islamic State – on their evenings after work, actually do watch “Teletubbies” and “Game of Thrones.” Then wake the next day to get back to work, swinging sledge hammers and bulldozers upon statuary of Assyrian Empire, sauntering into the museum with jackhammer, wearing Calvin Klein jeans. Then at night, home again to watch more Disney. Some of those writers creating the Disney happen to be my friends. Thus does fate distribute roles. Who among us is working for the Greater Good.)

* * * *

March 7, 2015

A day of lostness following editor’s dismissal of “All Things.”

Hardware store (for floorboard fasteners, etc).

California parking lots: they’re still my home. And shopping-center. What a salvation is the common human sodality among benign strangers, just to have rights of citizenship, rights of anonymity, rights of pedestrian, in a California shopping center (the Safeway supermarket, the laundromat, the storefront Cheaper Cigarettes, the pretty girl sitting on a curb in her demeaning “Safeway” cap-and-smock outfit with her cigarette and her iPhone bowed over texting, the loiterers) – my own beatific condition is that I’m nobody here, for in the depths of the social contract I’m beloved, innocent-till-proven-guilty.

Evening: down the road, a small hootenanny at Luke and Amy’s. We should do this more often.

The general thwarted sensation all day. The feeling that every activity – making purchases in town, watching television with others, getting a dobro part right – is something I’m “doing instead of having a life.” I’ve never had this feeling before. The feeling I’m onstage trying my best to be a background extra. And I wonder if many people live chronically with that? Always burying their faces in a fresh distraction because “their actual lives” hadn’t worked out. Seems like plenty of people are like that. Like a state of total bereavement, lifelong.

Late in the day: belated news that Rob had gone into, and come out of, hospitalization for influenza/pneumonia.

* * * *

March 6, 2015

More of pruning.

* * * *

March 5 2015

Pruning pear trees. I’m getting to it late in the season, so working in a blizzard of falling petals.

Finished with a draft of “Immanence.”

* * * *

March 3, 2015

Rob’s birthday. I always look forward to the long long-distance call. Put my feet up, as at no other time of the year. But he’s not answering.

More sifting of “Immanence” in the morning.

Both Elizabeth and Michelle are publishing short story collections, which goes to show, not all is lost.

Lunch at New Moon, with Mark Vance to finalize lyrics for choral song.

Romain is here for after-school music in the mud room.

Dinner meatloaf but Frenchified and rude, incl. pistachios. And a modern miracle befalls: I am able to text Michael in Berkeley and get immediate response: the Rosh Hashanah brisket was ketchup-mustard-seasoned, and let the mustard be the cheap Toyota-yellow kind.

* * * *

March 1, 2015

Sunday. Damp sunshine. Brett to return today from Monterey.

I’m keeping and even intensifying the “Fatuous Self-Regard” passages from “Immanence,” though I’m worrying that the old Unreliable Narrator trick is getting to be ineffectual in a world of increasingly lowbrow readers dominating tastes. It’s possible many readers in today’s enlarged market simply don’t want to read about somebody who strikes them as peculiar (icky, weird, head-up-ass). People want to read about somebody they like.

* * * *

February 27, 2015

Berkeley last night (for Brahms, Heggie, Ravel). At Noodle House on Telegraph, I’m all by myself for a bowl of pho, table for one by the wall, reading paperback: just me and my chopsticks and the napkin dispenser.

Afterwards, capp at Café Med.

Brett leaves today for weekend in Monterey, to plan Squaw with Lisa ostensibly but also to have fun, sack the thrift stores.

Here tonight: music with Luke & Co.

Little rain coming in.

* * * *

Every once in a while I say the right thing. A friend of mine had his novel selling in towering stacks in big-box stores and airports, and he was ashamed. I told him, “Oh, we’re all straws in the wind.” Turns out that was exactly right.

* * * *

February 24, 2015

Morning. Damp sunny day. Meadow steams. I wake late. A kind of shine knits together in my core, while I sit at kitchen table.

Sci fi movies have created the archetype of the extraterrestrial beings who arrive from a civilization that is infinitely superior to ours, as well as benevolent. When they arrive they’ll be gifted with powers like telepathy or instantaneous travel or telekinesis that, however, will be deployed for benign purposes only; creatures perhaps tall, radiant, awkward, moving like giraffes on the savannahs; their voices mellow and resonant and intimate.

I’m thinking of this at the kitchen table after a sleepless night, now eating my gory egg-and-toast at the kitchen table, while watching the two women and three dogs, far out in the distances of the meadow, where they’re making sure the dogs get a good romp, while themselves, they gossip and commune (before they are to set out on their own separate days’ hard work, boring to the dogs, who just sleep under their desks). And I have to think, We are those incalculable beings at least mostly, on this planet, exercising our telepathy and superpowers. Three dogs’ tails are visible at the meadow’s horizon, whipping around.

* * * *

Mantra for the lucky, to put themselves to sleep at night (from the Bible, Job): “My root is spread out to the waters, and the dew lies all night on my branch”

* * * *

February 23, 2015

Deepest, last twilight outside the kitchen: the garage out there is the last pale iceberg.

Pour glass wine, stand at kitchen door. One of the cats is still out, and really ought to be brought in, he’s in ecstasy, tossing a rodent over and over in the dark, something so big it makes an audible plump sound when it lands.

He’s in danger of coyote/bobcat predation at this hour, and I go out for him, but I’m sock-footed and can’t follow far. Come back inside, toss shrimp in lime and chili. On the radio I’ve got a podcast “Poetry: Off the Shelf”: the featured poet, being interviewed, has written a lot about the miseries and injustices of motherhood. She is saying her profound realization, thinking of her new relationship with her infant, was this: What’s good for the child might not be good for the mother!

Outside, the housecat is so delirious with savagery, he is an easy victim for the bobcat who has been raiding, so I go back out, shod, and he lets me murmuring approach him, and lets me separate him from his victim, and rises docilely into my arms, dazed, and possibly even relieved to be freed from his fever, already forgetting it as I carry him inside.

* * * * February 19, 2015

In the night sky, Jupiter remains a big distraction. But already Antares, shoulder of the scorpion, promises next summer’s sky.

I think I observe this every year at this time, but forgetfulness/repetition doesn’t diminish the satisfaction, maybe precisely it increases the satisfaction.

* * * * February 15, 2015

The carpet in Barbara’s cottage living-room:

It’s divided into squarish vignettes, each about eight-by-ten (a lamb, a bouquet, a milkmaid, etc.). Today she has been happier than usual, better-oriented than usual, and at “cocktail hour” I came in to find her sitting in the couch, leaning over her knees, scratching at the carpet design saying she had been trying for days to pick up that magazine fallen there.

Last week it was a small band of hens. They’d left the flock and invaded Barbara’s home thru the open door, mid-afternoon. This went on unsupervised for some while, and while she ate her eternal breakfast Barbara watched, with pleasure of a hostess, the hens pecking hungrily in the carpet pattern.

* * * *

February 14, 2015

Big day of sun and peace. Me: I am with paintbrush in kitchen on canvas tarps, open paint can, bedroom-slippered and pajamaed. Caramel butternut color.

Got the house refinanced. Brett and I traveled into town to the bank yesterday, and while the notary, before us, accomplished her ceremony of redundancy, I watched (this was happening behind everybody’s back, visible through the picture-window’s vast, perfectly clean glass) a very slow parking-lot collision. A plumber’s toolbox pickup vs. a gold Lexus, all in total silence while, inside the bank, we cleverly shored up our assets and I didn’t point it out to anybody.

Today is a new day, and this morning we’ve been like newlyweds in this house, wielding paintbrushes in our emptied-out kitchen. Brett is wearing the exact same spattered sweatpants as when we painted our indoors on a rainy night in Mill Valley in 1989 by harsh bare-bulb light.

Today, in the sun, in a country far from Mill Valley, the dog sleeps on the doormat. All the hens have been freed, and in the gardens and hedges they dig dustbaths for themselves and they pool down in. From the mudroom, the shout “Shut the fuck up!” arises every ten seconds or so. This is the chorus to a song: Dashiell has his three-man “punk” band in there, and they’re making a recording, trying to get it right.

* * * *

February 11, 2015

Now there are a total of three different hired “sometime friends” for Barbara – Viki, Pabby, and Jackie – and I think of these women in terms of the “boundless states” in Buddhist doctrine (brahmaviharas): Loving Kindness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy, Equanimity. They’re full of advice – (advice is a principle form of socializing) – what kind of oil to use for butcher blocks, when to harvest winter squash, when to plant winter onions, how to befriend a skittish dog. I remember astonishing – (or maybe alarming!) – a writer friend of mine at Squaw when I told her I wasn’t “ambitious” anymore, at least particularly for any book-biz success.

(Unfortunately, probably it wasn’t true, surely I was talking through my hat. But one can aspire, and at least rehearse it.)

* * * *

February 8, 2015

Sunday. Heavy rain for a third day.

Up early, finding documents for a fax to a loan processor.

At first light, I mix the oil and start work, oiling the entire exposed kitchen floor.

Done by early afternoon.

Dobro accompaniment for Sands at the winery, with Randy. (In the audience are Cavendish and Paul Emery, as if incognito, two of the town’s royalty, the people who make the town what it is.)

Dinner out with Dash and Brett, at Friar Tuck’s, where the clever guitarist covers pop standards, accompanying self with foot-pedal loop, winking to his appreciators.

* * * *

February 7, 2015

Brett has twice seen a small bobcat trying to get at the chickens. She “Roars Her Terrible Roar” whenever she catches it.

Since these things are guilty of killing her beloved pets, she so hates them, now she’s been going out with canned cat food, smearing it on the protective electrical wires, they turning the power back on.

* * * *

February 6, 2015

Pretty good rain coming. At six AM the strong pre-frontal winds lift and resettle everything on the property. Warm air! It’s disturbing: how the air is so hot in February, in the morning like a woman’s hairdryer blast.

I think I was so jazzed in the discovery of this “reminiscent” form of narration, the novelty and the wonderful effectiveness of it distracted me from certain actual effects I was creating.

* * * *

Red shoes. Who wears ‘e’em? – Rock stars and the Pope.

* * * *

January 30, 2015

The bottommost and surest consolation lies in this: how little, at all, we ever understand.

We feel, most of the time, personally secure, and personally effective, because we have developed a few knacks we think of as “knowledge and understanding” (going for green and stopping for red; tying a shoelace; predicting a sunrise, etc.), while in fact, we stand on soil we don’t understand, and we breathe atmosphere we couldn’t analyze.

The ultimate instance: Why should anybody fear “death” when they aren’t comprehending (or even looking straight at) the immediate experience that is conventionally called life? My children used to have a toy called a Furbie. In its circuitry, it was so constructed that it was “interactive” and responded to stimuli. It cried “Wheee!” with pleasure when gently tossed, and, if held upside-down, shuddered “Me scared!” There are neurologists and philosophers who seriously assert that our own responses to the environment are exactly as cognitive as the Furbie’s (“You’re hogging the blanket,” “Give us this day our daily bread and lead us not into temptation,” “I’m coming,” “Got any spare change?”) . Again I’m reminded of the old Japanese monk who emerged from some years of solitude and came upon a funeral procession. He wondered, “What is that one living creature doing being followed by all those dead people?”

* * * *

How wise to be “diversified”:

For the last six months, our hens haven’t been laying much – we’ve been providing feed and scratch and fodder and getting not much benefit – yet all that while, the stock market was been climbing and we’d been growing “rich.” Now, this month, the markets have been crashing and we’re poor again. But the hens are laying and we’re shamelessly affluent on a very local scale.

* * * *

January 29, 2015

The refrigerator, for a few days, is out on the grass shrouded by a blue tarp, belted with an old climbing rope of Tad’s.

In center of kitchen, the enormous range, half-on a dolly, is tilted like an ocean-liner run aground, the only furnishing in a room radiant with emptiness.

Repeatedly this week, the little fox has been caught tormenting the hens. Defeated by my wonderful fortifications, he shows up in the dusk to pace up and down outside the henhouse, looking for a way in. Causing hysteria inside.

* * * *

January 26, 2015

Overly warm summery days go on. Writing is on the back burner, while I throw house into disarray, refinishing pine floor. Kind of happy, not writing. Lately thinking of Eric, after a few rehab adventures, last year, found floating naked in the Truckee, his bottle of 7-Eleven vodka not far off, his bike in the riverside willows. I understand how he went down that path. He got out of Harvard and started a thirty-year career of carpentry, by day working hard, in traditional skills and techniques, and by night drinking quietly. That is a certain kind of happiness and a certain kind of fulfillment of man. I see the temptation.

Buddhist scripture, quoted in the NY Times: “Above, below, everywhere set free, not considering ‘this I am.’” Tonight, here, the women are watching a BBC melodrama in the cottage. Then Barb will be put to bed, to waken tomorrow to espy, by morning light, the erasable whiteboard on her bedroom wall. Which used to display her each day’s Fresh Exciting Agenda, as inscribed by daughter Brett. But which for a year now has had the same stale message every day: “This is your cottage. You are at home. Brett and Louis live right next door in the big house. THIS IS YOUR HOME.”

* * * *

January 25, 2015

Didn’t write. Instead, a pleasant, inefficient day – merely moved the heavy stove, repaired the old floor splinter, ran errands in town, played guitar at length.

* * * *

January 24, 2015

A hot day in January.

I’m disappointed with “Immanence” as it stands. It’s stalled out in the plot/characterization department.

It’s in their Middles that narratives (prose or drama) stand or fall. Nifty Endings and cute Beginnings are all too easy. The Small Literary Magazines of the world are stuffed with perishable stories in which a nifty ending is tacked onto a cute beginning. Solid Middles depend on characterization, and one’s understanding of “human nature” (this strange social institution we’ve got). Which is always up for debate/grabs.

Afternoon, a concert: an assembly of “young composers,” and Dash is objectively a stand-out.

It’s been a day devoted to the vagaries and demands of dependent people, particularly kids.

* * * *

January 23, 2015

“Immanence” in the morning.

Afternoon stripping the kitchen floor.

Tennis with Emily and Michael, after dusk, and as the overhead lights come on, three sets, plus shared-around beer.

* * * *

January 22, 2015

Dry warm winter days go on.

Dash has taken to rising early and walking in the dark the mile to the bus. (Just like his brother.)

Refinishing kitchen floor. A black sticky tar can be pulled off the boards by, first, dribbling hot teakettle water upon it.

New eyeglasses for me, calisthenics at club, pick up Dash.

* * * *

January 19, 2015

Having worked in the morning, I begin about lunchtime without forethought to tear up the venerable old linoleum of the kitchen floor. There was a flaw at one edge, which I enlarged to a tear, which then Brett enlarged further. And then we started ripping up long sheets, having to move furniture as we traveled. I think this hand-painted-pattern linoleum has been there since the thirties. Got Dash to join in, and soon we were hauling stove and refrigerator into the yard, disclosing the old boards. Tongue-and-groove fir, curly-grained. To be tung-oiled as soon as we get the old glue scraped up off a clean expanse.

In the meantime, the kitchen in Barbara’s cottage will suffice to produce coffee, pancakes, etc.

* * * *

January 18, 2015

Breakfast here with all of Diana’s people, the entire crew again.

See their movie, screened for a good crowd in Odd Fellows’ Hall on Spring Street.

I walk home alone from town.

Stump-removal and firewood splitting.

* * * *

January 17, 2015

No work today.

Breakfast in town (Ancinases, Millers, Naifys, film crowd).

Split firewood the rest of the morning.

Brett buys two more pullets.

All the movie people here for spaghetti, tables pushed together.

* * * *

January 16, 2015

Diana to arrive. Staying here, because her film is getting a screening in town.

* * * *

January 14, 2015

Home again from SF. The old jalopy is dependable.

On the drive all the way, thinking of that novel “Immanence.” It’s an open sore. Thinking of John Gegenuber’s fear of Mark Perdue.

Dashiell’s party went all right, according to all reports, but Dash says he didn’t like it.

* * * *

January 13, 2015

To Berkeley. Car holds up fine.

College Avenue scene. Reading old J.P. Marquand hardcover at a café table while the world swirls past.

Michael and Ayelet (and Abe! and Rosy! and Zeke these days!)

Futuristic irony: to hear my old pal Michael lean on doorframe, in the bedroom of a son who is taller than himself, and say, in a grim quiet tone, “What’s the homework situation.”

Then bookstore performance on College Ave. Then dinner with Wendy, sweet wobbly-table Italian place on College.

More with Michael, like old times.

* * * *

January 12, 2015

No writing.

Winter quarters: I’ve set up the more permanent desk in mud room by stove.

Sent “Things” to Joy in Rhinebeck. Fwisshhh.

Axed a hen, in the cool of the pines.

Errands in town: bank, drug store, grocery.

In the sun on a bench, outside the entrance to a market, a luxurious fifteen minutes eating Thai noodles from a lidded clear-plastic casket.

Then the optometrist, for new eyeglasses. I’m happy to be told I show no sign of glaucoma, macular degeneration, cataracts, etc.

Roast leg of lamb for Dash’s B-day.

* * * *

I have to admit I didn’t want to leave SF 20 yrs ago, but whatever fate led me up into the mountains was providential — (risk of unwarranted theology in that word), because it brought me to the stars. I hadn’t known about the stars. Nowhere are they quite like this.

Coming up from the hens’ department tonight, while the lamb has plenty of time to cook, I saw again the wonderful two forms of combustion (nuclear fusion in the stars, and sooty oxidation in the kitchen’s candlelight) and the two colors of radiation (colorless silver in immortality above; and gold in earthly carbon here), and I almost see the “Design” presence.

In, say, 1978 I could have been (at three am) alone in a restaurant with a name like “The Copper Penny” eating their fried rice ($2.50). Or any restaurant whose only raison d’etre is that it’s open at all hours. Or I might have been on a Van Ness streetcorner waiting for the late (only-every-hour) bus. I can picture that now, seeing backwards in time. And I suppose in 1978, I pictured myself here.

For in fact I have invented that figure in 1978 sitting at an orange Formica restaurant table as a fictional character.

I sometimes worry about Brett and her disappointment, posted here as she is, to be the manager of a house with a declining old mom and a bachelor-like contemplative and worrier. But then I notice when she’s out on the town, in her Parisian or New York finery, she’s tense and unhappy; compared to when I see her in sweatpants here in the meadows, freshly dusted with lime powder from chicken fumigation, or grubby-handed as when she was six, in the garden.

Squaw prospers: upon website launch, dozens of applications arrive immediately, and extra donations have come this year, from the likes of the Galway bequest.

* * * *

January 6, 2015

Comb once more, redundantly, over Things’s goat-invasion scene.

Apply for home loan.

With proper screwdriver bit, repair pocket-door a la Cavendish.

Overly warm dry days persist.

* * * *

January 5, 2015

Moving from bank to bank, looking for a refinance loan.

The key to Hunter’s car gets duped. But not successfully.

The hardware store provides a square screw-drive bit.

Two egg rolls at SPD.

Case wine at Grocery Outlet.

Dash gets picked up from his music-composition class.

* * * *

January 4, 2015

By daylight I got a look at the damage from attempted break-in to chicken coop. Easy repair. Seems to have been a coyote, as a lot of digging was tried at the base of the fence. Also, a few hairs had been shed that were short and stiff and grayish, coarse bristles, not feline.

Took down Xmas tree. (Brett rolls individual ornaments in paper and plants each down firmly, one-by-one in a big hatbox.) (Always an oddly tense unhappy time, putting away Xmas ornaments, always an odd time of recrimination and complaint and heartache.)

Enclosed one of the barley-fodder racks inside gopher-wire mesh, to foil the mice.

Sausage and potatoes for dinner. Watching TV comedies with Dash in the mud room.

* * * *

January 3, 2015

Fix bathroom pocket door. Exactly as Cavendish long ago instructed.

Jordan’s party.

Late night: the chickens’ enclosure was evidently besieged by some animal who was repelled by electric fencing. Found a wire stretched and shorting-out (snap…snap…snap…), the heavy insulator brackets broken. So it was a good-sized creature.

* * * *

January 1, 2015

New Year’s morning. I’m up early checking the irrigation everywhere for pipes that may be prone to burst in the cold snap. All the lights are on in Barbara’s cottage (3AM), and she’s awake, lost in time and space. She’s not frightened or despairing, but just softly befuddled, sorting among objects on tabletops. Needed to be conducted back to bed.

Later in the day, Brett finds a few pink Post-It notes fallen to the floor, where, with Bic pen, a shaky scrawl had been practicing writing the word “HELP.”

A well-learned Life Rule: After dropping off somebody you love at an airport, a shapeless formless dim day will ensue.

Wonderful how the NY Times is so skimpy today and all this week.

(Everything the skimpiness means about where people’s attention is, during the darkest, shortest days: their attention is elsewhere, on what matters.)

Cold and windy and sunny all afternoon. Hard freeze tonight. Have covered all freshwater spigots, have altogether drained the irrigation system, harvested all remaining cauliflower and broccoli.

Driving home from airport, my sentimentality:

At the cross where two great freeways meet (I-5 running north-south through the CA Central Valley, I-80 crossing east-west btw NYC and SF), I take the exit, and then pass under the big green sign: it indicates that the rightward ramp will set me on the road to “San Francisco,” the leftward ramp will point me up into the mountains. I’d just been talking, rather unpersuasively, to Hunter about how wonderful is city life, its density, in a place like DC, where for example just the view out the bus window is full of variety, complexity. Driving back alone, on the radio: the mayor of Casselton, North Dakota (pop. 2300), is saying he doesn’t want his town to be famous for last year’s disastrous train wreck. He wants his town to be known for “a great school system and fertile soil.” He’s so right. I think about “fertile soil and good schools” and actually get a tear in my eye.

* * * *

December 28, 2014

Back to regular work-out at gym.

Dinner of lamb stew with lemon rinds and Maggie’s dried figs.

Letter from Bobbie thanking me for the comfort my “letter of condolence” furnished, and it’s interesting: I find the widow’s gratitude to be a comfort. Hadn’t realized I’d needed comfort.

Long, long late-night kitchen-table conversation with Hunter. Mostly about how atrocious yet inevitable The Capitalist System is. (Hunter sees only the atrocities and is not at all mellow about the “inevitability” part.)

* * * *

December 26, 2014

Back on “Things” at last.

Write “In Memoriam” piece for the Omnium Gatherum.

Exertion-free sedentary day.

Music down the road at Luke and Amy’s – banjo, mandolin, dobro, Fargo accordion.

Cold snap arrives. * * * *

December 25, 2014

Now on Christmas morning it’s parents and aunts who have to be patient (pajamas, coffee, NPR, email). It’s “the kids” who are the last out of bed.

A not-very-extravagant Christmas, practical inexpensive gifts: a kind of logical outcome is that, minus the spectacle of shiny treasure, the rest of the day doesn’t wind up melancholy and obscurely sore. (as in some years)

Brett’s gift from the boys is a performance of (her favorite) The Pixies’ tune “Here Comes Your Man.” Hunter on piano, Nico drums, Dash on glockenspiel doing the spritely riff. Song is performed several times consecutively, getting it a little better each time.

This is a day of bright sun, cut short by the south-of-meadow pines.

All others take a long walk through the woods to Hirschman Pond, while I stay home and split firewood in the sun, also minding the napping Barbara.

Roast leg of lamb, then lots of song in the mudroom.

(How musical is the mathematical structure of nature. All afternoon a firewood-splitting man sees it, in how the cedar grain breaks, into combs and harps. The marimba clank of every bar of firewood landing on the pile.) * * * * December 23, 2014

Nice storm coming in, promises to be blustery and dark and wet and short-lived.

I’m cute: I was walking up Broad Street this morning carrying the sort of brown paper bag that is identifiably from a boutique (string-handled, odd-dimensioned, awarded a decorative sticker). And Gretchen Bond happens to go by in her wifely car, which has slowed – the better to appreciate the uxorious, magnanimous sight of me. With obviously that appraisal, Gretchen grinning fondly from behind fogged-up side-window.

* * * *

December 22, 2014

Cut Christmas tree with Dash and Hunter.

Risotto at Sands’s.

Insomnia.

Jupiter lights the sky, brighter than Sirius, or than any other star, magnificent. Coyote howls on the ridge.

* * * *

December 21, 2014

Dec 21 is supposedly the darkest, longest night of the year. Some want a Saturnalia, or fantastic or even lewd party. Some expect a mysterious astrological transit between epochs. Women I know complain if they’re spending the long cold night abed alone. Me: Dull with my own repletion, I’ve come home after winey dinner at Sands’s with all the sisters and both my boys and the fireside, and the stars have come out, and I have to put the hens to bed. One dying hen tonight (she’s been on the way out for a while) couldn’t climb to the roost, and lies with labored breathing, in the cedar shavings on the floor under the ramp. Slow heave of the feathers, which she may once have been vain of. (Hens of course have vanity, it’s most of what they’ve got in their worldly estate: vanity.) All the rest of her sisters above on racks. This longest, darkest night, it’s her job to die, which she might accomplish this night. The point is, my heart is really with her tonight rather than any others, rather than the revelers in town seeking Saturnalia, or even the lonely women, because I’ve spent that night in the same expectation as hers. And will again, for sure; and then have my expectation rewarded. In a way, it’s mortals’ greatest night, the last. It’s something I have in common with lowly barnyard animals, and in fact, precisely this is the night’s great redressal: that even the simplest animal has her ruling claim to this night.

* * * *

December 20, 2014

Nice car-ride with Hunter, to Sacramento.

We’re going to Dashiell’s “gig,” in a real club, roomful of black T-shirts.

After the show: a Dairy Queen on Saturday night, 11:00, in Sacramento, California, crowded, a scene of amity.

I can see that for forty years I’ve been doing the same things and holding the same beliefs, and probably even saying the same things. (Environmentalism, ontology, taking fiction to be the more accurate truth, music, the same themes, the same friends and women – or rather woman – the bad habits, the same obsessions.) I observe my life to be a long straight line, no swerves, and I wonder if this is a virtue. I have to make it so, because it’s in my nature, fidelity. Or more basic than fidelity, constancy, because somebody has to make the world a warmer place, not a more capricious, cooler place. Or so I may justify my own nature.

* * * *

Another hour in the sun between rains. I split more cedar and let the chickens roam around and peck. The whole lane is one loaf of moss. Astonishing variety of mushrooms.

Under my feet is the first, the original (and still primary!) civilization: soil. Rhizomes, spores, bacteria, fungus’s powders and yeasts, all in mycorrhizal mat, symbiotic (mutualistic) collaborations of white intelligent threads with lacy-woven cake of ultra-fine tickling mycelia, doing plant-roots the favor of protecting them from pathogens, seeking their own food for themselves, the whole network of chemical information, an underground civilization that communicates over distances and sends up weird-looking trees and mushrooms as its cattle, or slaves, large-scale importers of foodstuff to the underground mycorrhizae. (Always chanterelles by the birches, always morels in the vicinity of madrones, dung bells around wherever an animal has crapped.) When dark had come completely, I put down my axe and came inside and opened up my computer. It’s been a big day in the stock market: Google stock has upticked, and this is the Dow Jones Newswireheadline: “Google is Now Bigger than Russia’s Entire Market.” (Partly a fluke of the ruble’s being temporarily depressed.)

But I think of those dark onion-dome villages, oxcarts and ox dung in snow, potatoes, birch forests, steppes. “Google,” which exists only in pixils, is bigger than Mother Russia.

* * * * December 16, 2014

Rain goes on.

NASA avers that the presence of a little trace methane on Mars indicates “there might once have been” life.

Well, there’s a lot of hopeful thinking about this. There are a million motives for thinking/hoping that we’re not the only ones in the universe. (Very serious motives. It gets eschataological, if you follow it down.) I continue to believe that the nearest intelligence (which is what we’re really wishing for, not just a colony of viruses or slimes) will have existed only in entire other Hubble spaces from ours. Uncontactable, and effectively non-existent. It’s just statistically too improbable.

These hopes for “other lives” don’t change our existential mystery. The existential mystery is of course the gut motive for space exploration, for the rover “Curiosity” and for “Mariner.” (The motive isn’t capitalism, out there. That’s not the real motive.) But these explorations won’t change anything fundamental. Finding and even fraternizing with an extra-planetary race won’t answer the big questions. (The motto “Everybody already knows everything” applies.)

* * * *

Late afternoon mid-December (5 o’clock?). I’ve accomplished some winter garden chores during this break in the drenching rains. A tenderness of saturation has overtaken everything (tree-bark and swampy soil, mossy stone wall, emerald scum on the lost badminton shuttlecock, the suck of turf on the lifting boot heel), and at the bottom of the meadow in the depths of the forest-edge I’m swinging an axe for an hour over cedar rounds. Never the need for a wedge with these. An axe alone will part the thickest cedar. An hour or so of this will be enough (while the fact is, I’m posted here only as chicken-guardian, against bobcats), and there will be other hours, over time, to create 2016’s firewood supply. Come the cold weeks, this big supply will dwindle fast to nothing. Also it feels great. The exercise, after a sedentary week indoors, is like Olympic swimming for the shoulders, arm sockets, as, in the axe-swing cycle I grow very tall, trapeze-catching tall, before bringing down the axe. Opening the standing log. I could do this all night. The world in a December five-o’clock grows so dim – I can still see my targets, the circular bright log-ends I set up on the chopping block as victims – but soon the only light in the whole world is the littered rectangles of gold, spilt all around the chopping block. Somehow the exposed woodgrain has absorbed the lost light of sky in order to reradiate it. The earth under my feet is vanishing, the whole great sky has vanished. But I can orient myself on the ground by the glowing flags of woodgrain scattered like manuscript pages all around, the only light sources.

* * * *

December 13, 2014

Saturday. Started clear, sunny, then turned cold and overcast.

Broccoli is coming in strong. Also broccolini and cauliflower.

Topped a few broccolini for dinner tonight, stems vulnerable and soft.

* * * *

Interesting, maybe it’s a fortunate “male psychology” quirk. I have found in a moment of “extremis” – when everything looks like despair and failure and lovelessness – if I grope for some mental image to try to remind myself life can be desirable and sweet again, it’s the woodpile outside at the foot of the meadow I see. That’s what saved me. It’s all the rounds of cedar needing splitting. That woodpile seemed like a reason for living, an island of light. Something I can do. * * * * Back from San Francisco.

In such a trip, I hate the expense of gasoline: 13 gal. of the fragrant essence. (I had to take the truck rather than the vegetable-burner.)

The city is beautiful, it always was, still is, but it’s good to drive back uphill through the light rain, come back to this life we’ve needed some years to relearn, like Ewoks on this improbable planet in a forest environment rooted in carboniferous loam, beneath the big wooden dendrite shapes (hundred-feet-tall and taller), where we actually eat things we walk out the backdoor and break from their stems. Bring inside and sauté.

There’s been great news this week – the International Energy Agency forecasts that, next year, world demand for oil will fall by 900,000 barrels a day.

So the foolish stock market is crashing. Panic and despair. Combined drop of 500 points in three days.

Those guys (who really think they want a 30-room Connecticut house; there really are such people) have refused for forty years to see the solar panels and windmills they could have gotten rich on. It’s a cultural divide. They want to live big, and you can’t exactly blame them, they’ve never seen/loved anything.

* * * * December 10, 2014

Barometric gradients are tight across the great valley and 60-mph winds are expected. 110-mph gusts over passes. Marvelous monster-storm is coming. It’s everybody’s favorite small-talk topic. NOAA radar shows whirling spiked beast in the Pacific grinding in this direction, and I’ve been cleaning gutters (up on the roof there standing up getting a nice view of the bleak sky) as winds are kicking up, and I’m pulling stuff inside sheds, getting out the generator and testing it.

Much of the afternoon: total battening-down of poultry quarters, in consultation with Brett. The practical pleasures of just consulting. Out there in the bluster.

Satisfaction of closing hook-and-eye latches on outbuildings.

Meager dinner of frail cauliflower from the garden, leftover pork-roast’s desiccated splinters, a squash, sautéed with adobo, all tucked into tortilla. The beginnings of squalls on the roofs. Outside, the characteristic ocean sound from the tall pines on high ridges. I really might not go to SF tomorrow.

After dinner, I ‘check out” Dash and Brett on the operations of the generator, just in case:

fuel supply “ON”

power switch “ON”

choke “on,” then (having pulled the starter cord) “off”

All this in the dodgy light of an iPhone sequin, (somehow the pantry flashlight has gone missing)

* * * *

December 9, 2014

My new motto: “Arise and Perish” – good thing to christen a novel, a rock band’s mid-career album, a sailboat, country estate, pennant on the family crest, thoroughbred racehorse, etc.

News arrives via BBC that, in south amer somewhere today, the “oldest tree in the world” was cut down, accidentally. There, that tree hath arisen and perished, here at the peak of our Kali Yuga aeon.

* * * *

Barbara has been experiencing very itchy hives, and I handed across to her the tube of Benadryl cream and left the room. (Hoping only that she wouldn’t get it mixed up with the cortisone cream in a similar tube.) Later in the day, Brett says she’s finds the lady has been applying her Sensodyne toothpaste generously all over.

When the allergist’s apptmt is made, Jolena the nurse contributes the following, “Oh, toothpaste, of course. My parents were Hungarian immigrants. They used to do the exact same thing.”

* * * * December 8, 2014

Tag-line of an editorial in the NY Times this morning cites the following. It is apparently (I didn’t click through to read the editorial itself) – an illustration of modern philosophy’s absurdity:

Most people think that philosophy tries to answer the Big Questions.

“How do you know you believe you are wearing socks?” doesn’t sound like one of them.

God-help-me, though, I think it’s an urgent, wonderful question. I think it goes straight to the crucial hanging-by-a-thread suspensefulness of minute-by-minute life. Of course it’s a question for neuropsychologists. But the reasonneuropsychologists or anybody might care about it is the root philosophical issue. And the rather dire metaphysical issue, How do we live in the world? What is this tiny pilot behind my eyes at a control-panel? What are these weird goggles the pilot seems to be looking through — and are the shapes appearing in those goggles representations of anything? (Physiologists’ word “proprioception” doesn’t explain how you know you’re wearing socks. It’s just a word. Inventing a new word doesn’t dispel a mystery.)

Because obviously, what if the old unlettered Buddhists were right? They might (tho’ lacking tomography, lacking EKGs; unskilled in brain surgery, phrenology; unhelped by Freud or B.F. Skinner) have been waiting at the finish line all along:

The complete Dharma would add: Not only does this supposed consciousness have no “self,” but the objects of consciousness (tables and chairs and trees and clouds) have no “selves” either.

I’m afraid such a summary makes a point so obvious as to be empty, to be irrelevant, i.e., irrelevant to the fraught scientific controversy. (The scientific controversy has its own sure path to negotiate, beyond any help from alien scriptures’ old platitudes.)

* * * *

(No, the Times editorial is by Qassim Cassam, philosopher at English university. Good of the NYTimes editors, occasionally to be serious and adventuresome.)

* * * *

December 7, 2014

These crucial “few decades” in climate evolution – (this period when the carbon-balance will go past equilibrium and doom the Earth) – JUST HAPPEN to be the same few decades the fossil-fuel folks and their stockholders are counting on. To eke out of the diminishing resource the last (the exponentially leveraged) profit. Sad situation. Sad for them as well as us. That they’ll never get their thirty-room house in Connecticut will be the least of their worries.

* * * *

December 6, 2014

That same pair of thrushes has come back, and they’re pecking in the same section of the meadow as in other winters. The whole expanse of wilderness, from here to the Northwest Territories, has a kind of small-town quality. These two birds have been up in the forests of (I imagine) British Columbia, and a couple of weeks ago they agreed (nonverbally) to head for that same California meadow they’d foraged on in other years, the one with the two easy-to-avoid housecats and the dog and the two big oaks, quails in the blackberries, the skinny hare that crosses diagonally at twilight.

Wonderful overcast all day, gloomy churchyard light. Slept late, worked only a couple of hours.

Improving bird-netting on barley-fodder, to stop theft of sprouts by every sparrow and wren around here, as if this were becoming a famous bird-feeding station in the county. Enclosed all sprouting shelves in my own handmade box of gopherwire mesh.

Late afternoon. In the steady rain picking up oak deadfall.

* * * *

December 4, 2014

Drab wintry day.

Hammered at last chapter of “Things,” acc. to the usual procedure of simplifying, then discovering complexities, then beating complexities back to simplicity.

A day of suspense watching the markets, as this is when the portfolio fills, upon transfer, and one hopes for a down market.

Finished reading Andrew’s novel. Will move on to Richard’s.

Soup of leeks and potatoes, but added tough chard from the garden (chopped) and ham (diced) leftover from thanksgiving.

Last chapter of ‘things” will continue to bother me.

* * * *

December 2, 2014

Last night was Dashiell’s punk concert at the Stonehouse. His was the opening band. Half the audience was Moms and Dads, standing far from the mosh pit. It was just a 2-person mosh pit. Guitarist (slight, undersized boy paralyzed with stagefright) had a jacket with BLACK FLAG emblazoned. I wanted to tell him that his own band tonight, of 14-yr-old three-chorders, is much better than legendary Black Flag was, in performance. The next band’s drummer, setting up his kit, wore a rotten T-shirt with FUCK chalked onto the front, DESTROY chalked onto the back, while Dash (who had homework yet to do, and this was a school night, so it was a lucky thing his was the opening band) packed his gear away in a basket, along with (at bottom of basket) his large, spilling collection of old “Magic: the Gathering” cards – for example “Vulshok Sorcerer,” pictured as a kind of voluptuous S&M dominatrix but Celtic, outfitted in leather halters-and-cups-and straps. Her legend: “Vulshok Sorcerers train by leaping into electrified stormclouds. Dead or alive, they come back down with smiles on their faces.” * * * *

New photographs in the astrophysics world, published in the NY Times:

The Planck Satellite telescope (launched by European Space Agency) has been focusing on a distant spot in space, far back in Time.

It’s looking at an area 14B light-years distant – (edge of visible universe, birth of visible timespace) – where it has photographed the swirls of ionized dust at a rather primordial time of Univ. infancy, a time when all of space was about the temperature of the sun. (The universe was a bud, then, 380,000 yrs old. Which isn’t much.) (That timespan on earth goes back to one of our “ice ages.” So 380,000 yrs isn’t much.)

It’s a wonderful image, from Planck. It’s the universe at its moment of clearing up and becoming visible, the moment when space became “transparent” to electromagnetic radiation (light). All twirling ripples. The colors that the scientists have chosen to define that time’s characteristics are warm and coral-like – ultramarine and tropical turquoise (in the “cool” color zone), and (in the “warm” color zone) strands of yellow-orange and saffron intensifying to threads of deep iodine. These are the balmiest-possible colors they could possible have chosen (colors from snorkeling in Caribbean bays), to create a picture of that abstract kiln back in a time when hyper-heated plasma constituted the entire world. The colors aren’t necessarily such a fantasy, though. In fact, if your “eyes” had been there to “see,” they might indeed have seen such beauty (presuming such “eyes” were attuned to detect radiation like that).

(“Why is anything here” — easy and unavoidable answer to that question is the “anthropic” answer: Everything’s here because “WE” are here).

But the really super-duper mystery isn’t merely that we exist, or that the universe exists: the kicker is that we understand the universe. The universe is intelligible. That was a totally uncalled-for addition: that the little human mass of gray matter we’ve evolved (brain, gooey) can, for instance, write Euclid’s geometry and then apply it to the swing of comets. We on this little planet can look back in time and measure “wavelengths” and “temperatures” that we ourselvesdefined and calibrated. We ourselves wrote out the rules of arithmetic for manipulating those measurements. It’s an intelligible universe. Who decreed that? (Was it us?) Well, it’s an interesting notion. The unasked-for intelligibility of reality goes to the anthropic story of genesis: this universe of ours exists because it’s cognizable. And, necessarily, thisuniverse exists because we evolved to recognize it.

This reverses the cause-result nexus, as if in a kind of time-reversal : (NOT “we are here because the universe was here for us to evolve in,” BUT “the universe has evolved here because we’re here understanding it.”) Especially when you consider that the little “edge-of-universe” event, which we focus our telescopes on, is transpiring at the Beginning of Time. At the same moment, anybody out there at the edge who may have evolved, if they focus on this galaxy of ours, will be seeing not us, but the inchoate dust and congealing stellar matter that would someday be “us.”

(The “cause-result nexus” itself is less necessary than it was in earlier, more limited views of the universe.) * * * * In the same newspaper is this editorial observation, about our planet’s climate change: If we don’t pass peak carbon emissions within fifteen years Earth will become “uncomfortable.” And if we don’t get past peak emissions within fifty years Earth will become “uninhabitable.”

The mark of progress here is that the New York Times thinks it’s “news,” and fit to print. It’s nice to see the slowest (i.e., “most practical,” and you might say “most venal”) institutions of our society at last wake up, and you might say, grow up.

* * * *

December 1, 2014

Rainy day, and acc. to the NWS, many rainy days are stacked up ahead.

Today:

Settle Barb’s finances. (Decision: to put her shrinking nest egg into the care of money manager, pay the management fee, rather than run it myself. It’s all very interesting and in a few weeks of study I’ve won and lost a fortune in imaginary money, but it’s just inefficient, for me to be running it.)

In Squaw, call plumber, exterminator, Pomin’s, gas inspection.

My new motto:

“EVERYBODY KNOWS EVERYTHING.”

It’s merely necessary to pretend otherwise (for one’s own deception/beguilement. And for others’).

(The motto effects as a remedy against indecision or any hesitancy. An enjoinment to self-reliance.)

It’s a rainy Monday morning, Dash and Brett have left for school-bus deposit, and the two cats are settling in for the long haul – one sleeping tight, on a fallen bath towel, the other watching through a window – and I’m beside the mud room stove again, for long morning of work.

* * * *

November 28, 2014

Up late last night, playing guitar and drinking with Chris.

Early return to NC, as the snowstorm coming in will shut down the pass. * * * * November 26, 2014

Arrived in Squaw alone, early. Others to come.

Everything is in good order. No tinder for a fire. Not anywhere in the house, no old newspaper, nor even cardboard box. (I always think of burning torn-out pages from novels off the shelf. The question would be: which?) But the new-year’s phonebooks are there, lying on the doormat. Phonebook pages go up in a flash and a poof, but suffice.

Chris and Claudia for salmon soup, night before Thanksgiving.

The turkey is brined (my own clumps of sage and thyme. And for juniper-berries, Dash is sent up onto the roof, with flashlight, to harvest only the black ones, never the green ones – Claudia’s instructions).

Three dogs are friends here. Romp around. Sleep separately, in separate corners. Dogs really love being dogs, the responsibilities they have, as well as the diversions.

* * * *

November 26, 2014

To Squaw today, for Thanksgiving.

Bit of epistemological thinking:

That we live in a rainbow made of “particles-and-forces” is conventional. But it may be more strictly accurate to say we live in a rainbow made of language.

To attempt even the most basic, clear characterization of “time” involves a metaphor. We say it’s “a flow,” or “it passes.” These are only metaphors. Metaphor alone is the thing making Time intelligible, or even sensible. This though we stand always in Time’s midst, and can’t have presence without it. We live inside a metaphor – inside our conception of time – as if time essentially consists in “our conception” of it.

Extend this subjective-center view to other categories of experience (“space” is a metaphor, the “cause-result nexus” is a metaphor).

However, “the number system” seems perhaps not to be a metaphor in the same sense. The number system doesn’t “stand in place of” some other “thing.” Numbers have a different ontological status, of some sort. They are something. Something rather autonomous. They exist free of perception. * * * * November 22, 2014

Nice hard rain this morning. Slow start getting to work.

(Pleasant distraction: I’ve agreed to write words for Mark Vance’s choral work a capella for twenty voices, male and female: must be about a red pickup.)

Dash and friends, this AM, must be driven (by Brett) thru rain to the downtown Grass Valley movie house, for another “simulcast” of an opera from the Met. They have to get there at ten AM (because matinee curtain in NYC is 1:00).

I check on Barbara in her cottage midmorning, and she’s already awake and panicky and disoriented, but like a mare easily gentled. Even quickly ashamed of having been scared. Repentant, guilty-feeling. I promise her a poached egg and turn on the lights, and I’m able to produce a cheery anecdote she’ll recognize familiar ingredients in: her grandson Dash has been taken to the opera, it’s Bizet’s Carmen, remember how Oakley liked Carmen, and all morning Dash and his sleepover friend have been going around in anticipation humming that sexy “Habanera” aria tune.

This actually makes Barb laugh. Rare event. Then, sitting in nightgown, waiting for her poached egg to appear before her, hairbrush on her knee, she’s looking out the window quietly humming that sinuous, lascivious melody for a prima donna. * * * *

November 20, 2014

Long phone call with my brother, Iowa City neurologist:

“I tell my students: here’s a patient who can write but he can’t read. And they’re notawed! For them, it’s ‘Oh, that’s interesting, will this be on the test?’ Like they’re getting it down in their notes, ‘Can write but can’t read,” without thinking what that’s like.

“I try to tell them they have to stop and be dumbfounded. This patient is a person who can write something perfectly well, and then he can’t read what he’s just written. You have to imagine that! I tell them, ‘I want you to go home now and think about that and come back tomorrow completely awed by it.’ I mean what’s it like in there?”

What’s it like in here is a question for all, not just one neurologically damaged patient. We’ve all got the same apparatus – same as that guy whose apparatus happens to malfunction. * * * * Thinking of the ill-fatedness of my endeavors in life: How is it that I can mix “highest-ambitions-unremitting-work” (starting at 3am every morning for decades) with a happy indifference to the failure of my plans (not to mention the practical penalties and privations thereof)?

I remember being ten or twelve years old, walking with my mother in Evanston being taken to some appointment, and my mother’s telling me, “Louis, you know you’re extremely intelligent, you’ll always be intelligent, but you’ll never be ‘smart.’” This with a little fond satisfaction.

She didn’t know the half of it. Of course I’ve always known it about myself. I even knew then, at that age, exactly what she meant, and I admired her for seeing it. (It was always a lucky circumstance in my growing up, having a perspicacious, sly mom.) But it’s not as if I’d ever want to change my disposition. Watching “the wicked prosper” never provokes actual envy (not in me, nor really in anybody frankly). And in my own case, I grew up seeing plenty of unhappy prosperity. And in Calif have lived with plenty of it. * * * *

The Four Characteristics, a jest of mine that definitely did not amuse anybody at the Spirit Rock Zen Center:

Dukkha

Anicca

Anatta

Bling

* * * * November 18, 2014

Good long rain is promised by the NWS. Snow over the passes rules out a trip to Reno for their literary confab.

An afternoon built partly around laundry, of all things. Keeping perfectly halal practices of Environmentalism around here. Had to resort to the propane-powered dryer in the end, if only for a few minutes, because a clothesline on a gloomy, cold day is so slow.

Tad’s pickup has been stuck at the foot of the meadow. Today it was towed away to Plaza Tire and Automotive.

Rise in temperature in advance of the front: the midnight air feels almost steamy. Tomorrow will be the cold plunge. * * * * November 17, 2014

Truckee-Tahoe Foundation comes through with a little money.

Whole afternoon cleaning up yesterday’s slash from cedars, but the rounds are still lying in the forest, too heavy to deal with. Maybe – in fact definitely – I’ll split them down there. Use tractor cart for their transport.

For my birthday: a shirt, a pair of socks, a pocket stargazer’s guide. The three of us around the candle.

* * * *

November 15, 2014

’Bye, Dana. Rental car, down the road, turn left at the highway, then right on 49.

Work today: A rather routine day effortlessly burbling up a scene (Episcopal church evacuation) in “Things.” Effortlessness makes a man think he must be stupidly missing something.

Saturday afternoon project: bringing down the two biggest cedars of the whole grove I’ve been pulling down. (Having taken the trouble to sharpen the chain on the workbench with proper file – so my efficiency goes way up.) They’re lying out there now in the starlight and the damp, felled and cut-up but not cleaned up.

Late-afternoon Saturday study: I’m starting to think this project of valuing stocks for day trading is just too esoteric. Waste of time? I really don’t want anything to be a waste of time. I’m sure that’s one outcome to avoid.

Sauteed lentils-&-kale on pasta.

Brett and Dash have gone out to a movie (animated feature), leaving me here with my contemplations

* * * *

November 14, 2014

Dana visits from CO.

Brings negatives of great baby pictures of Brett.

Back to clearing cedars from south meadow. I’m going to have way too much firewood next year. But the cords have been going fast lately, and the clearing has to be done, as the cedars are poking into the 150-foot canopy of oaks. I’m taking out a whole habitat.

* * * *

November 13, 2014

Spent the entire day hardly getting out of the creased big leather chair in the mud room. Work, work, work, all the nest-egg-preservation, learning about financial crap, writing a summary of Squaw Future for Brett and the Board, plus the fundraising email letter, and a mostly damaging (afternoon-consuming!) stab at “Things” (cutting out an entire scene), one thing after another, until deep in the dusk, the stove had gone cold, colder, and I’m still in the same chair. Pesto for dinner. Outside, drizzle all day long. * * * *

November 12, 2014

Faint but warm sunshine.

Rake out all chicken premises.

At work, another morning removing the most amazing incompetences and misdirections embedded in “Things.” Only a manuscript that had spent so much time mutating into entirely new shapes could end up with so many glaring vestigial problems the author couldn’t see.

Dinner of black cod packed six days in miso, sugar, mirin.

* * * *

November 11, 2014

Thinking of my mother (mentioned “dozing in her wheelchair”) and the impossibility of ever again seeing her.

The sad thing about even the closest such relationship is: what strangers all people always remain, to each other.

What a closed book, to me, my mother always was.

Starting in Iowa in 1923, a girl on a farm, and traveling for ninety-one years on the Midwestern map in loose scribble-pattern (Milwaukee, Chicago, Madison, Iowa City, Evanston, Burlington), she had a life: the full story; the entire five-act opera with a cast of thousands and Dolby SurroundSound, a story so deep and dark and rich, she herself could never get below the surface of it. (Try though she might.) * * * * November 10, 2014

Turning summer garden under.

Strewn out on the meadow, carnage of tomato vines. And cucumber and zucchini vines.

Will plant cabbage, kale, garlic, onions. * * * * November 9, 2014

Sunday. Brett to SF for the day, for Squaw meeting. * * * *

November 8, 2014

All our worries:

Brett is worried about the future of Squaw, her own waste-of-life caretaking of mom

Me, I’m worried about the book business and my own fate in it

The dog is worried about the cats’ wanton frolicking

Dashiell is worried about Ebola coming here

* * * *

The red sweater Galway wore under his jacket, in the rich gloom of the Century Club. That color was from Caravaggio. It welcomed the whole world.

Strange how I’m not extraordinarily aggrieved about Galway’s death. It occurs to me maybe it’s because a real poet’s whole life is all about his death; and his presence is all about his absence; a poet has already, always been a tombstone which anyway is how we got to know him in the first place. Such is his ministry, if he’s really a poet. That’s what writing is: absence. And a poet is a “writer” par excellence.

More cutting back the old cedar grove beyond the oaks. Near mishap today: a small (sixteen-inch?) tree falls wrong: the felling cut bites my saw to clamp down on it, and then the whole tall mass starts tipping toward me, fast.

(The problem was: as I was making the felling cut, on the far side my blade was, unbeknownst, nibbling into the directional notch.)

Having a hard time writing a letter of condolence to Bobbie Kinnell, whom I do grieve for, whom I remember as a most sparkling girl. (In her long-billed cap.)

Brett brings home nursery starts for cabbage, kale.

Every morning, I’m ironing out “Things.” Discovering my stupidities. Wherever a narrative is not working it’s because I was inattentive to character. Always character.

* * * * November 2, 2014, Sunday

After good long rain: Sunny day.

All tomatoes have been stunned by two days’ cold and will stay small and green and never mature. The little maple over the path to the chicken coop is red/yellow/peachy. Tad’s truck is still parked down by the woods. Halloween colors: umber, persimmon, shit, sparrow.

This afternoon, driving down Highway 20 to Rough&Ready, it’s all beautiful. The curve in the road ahead of me is the same curve that’s always been ahead of me, all my life – on the way to summer camp in Wisconsin with dad at the wheel, on the way out to the Pacific via Lucas Valley Road, escaping down the coast highway with Hobbs and Birnbaum in Birnbaum’s convertible, rounding the bend toward Squaw Valley in a VW Squareback, in a borrowed car going up Monadnock’s curving road, or over the Alleghenies toward Canarsie. It’s all, always, the same road. And beauty is always the same pain.

In ‘beauty,” though, these days, this is a sensation rather new: I find that “Pleasure” hasn’t been on the menu for a long time. This stage of life seems to have set in prematurely with me. “Pleasure” is unappetizing, candy, indigestible. North of Rough&Ready, there’s a little open pasture where a calf is suckling, burrowing under the arch of its mother. In this, there’s “beauty,” but no pleasure in the sense I once understood it. Now I see pain in it all; the pain pokes through more and more visibly as the beauty sharpens; so there’s, instead, a kind of larger architectonic pleasure in participating in the general grief. Or say not pleasure but “satisfaction.” There’s a satisfaction just in being at my post now, insomniac, keeping the vigil, from here on out. I can see, clearly, the zero-sum game ahead of us all, and I have to kind of like and admire the elegance of the whole lay-out. Knowing we have nothing to lose makes me brave and somewhat imperturbable. The deluded greedy calf. The sign on the Rough&Ready feed store: “PIGS $120 EA.” The boy practicing his lay-ups on a hoop nailed to a driveway oak. Poor guy. * * * *

November 1, 2014

Interesting contemplation of a very simple Fundamental, which persists all around us:

One phenomenon I’ve seen firsthand – (that is, I’ve been literally in the room for it) – is that a child’s flesh is the mother’s flesh, which then separates, physically and a bit messily. Plenty of us have been in the room for that.

Now my own mother died earlier this year. For six months now, my own flesh has been getting along all right. I’ve been surviving freely alone, on a luckily still-habitable planet, without a glimpse of my physical fleshly origin (back there in the Iowa convalescent home, dozing in a wheelchair in hot sunshine on linoleum, her oil-crayons scattered out before her on the Strathmore pad). Nor is there any possibility of such a glimpse of her, ever again, time being irreversible.

I’ve fathered two boys, though – which does admit me into the chain of human physicality, in this cold cosmos. But it admits me in only partially, because only as a spectator: a male. This is the palpable condition: Women remain a part of the vine. Their flesh, literally, physically, is continuous. Men are spurs taking off from that vine – with maybe an fair chance of culminating in a berry or fruit of some sort; or else (as with many guys) just ending in thin air. A male doesn’t “bear fruit,” in the sense of physically swelling up with a new, separate (separable) human.

It is definitely an existential, palpable background feeling: the yeast that is life, it dies with a man. So, man “looks upon” woman. Always has. (Indeed the “male gaze,” according to recent feminist doctrine, is the basic obnoxiousness.) The whole setup makes maleness a spiritual and (I have to wonder) forlorn condition.

* * * *

October 30, 2014

Up early, tho’ little accomplishment. By eight am I’d quit and come in the house, to spend the rest of the day wrangling with financial folk at 800 numbers. (I’ve had to move old Barbara’s nest egg to a new place.) Hunting up old records. Faxing things. Inventing “User IDs” and “Passwords.” Discovering dates of birth (1923), and mothers’ maiden names (Johnson). So, getting and spending, we lay waste our days. (courtesy W. Wordsworth) Well, getting and spending are necessary, and even kind of fun – that is how I would advise a Romantic poet.

(But I must admit, an entire day of this scheming is a poor investment.)

3:00 to 4:00, Dash and I play tennis. Lackadaisically, distractedly. Agree to quit early. Corn dog and root beer at the IGA.

The dark, short days are definitely here, and tomorrow we’ll be attacked by the first decent Pacific storm of the season (8-10 inches over the summit). Prevailing east wind has this evening swung around to the south (storm recipe). My love of inclemency is mammalian-deep, and I seem to have spent the last few days garnering wealth – starting a heap of unsplit cedar rounds in the far meadow for future firewood, mixing and mastering the homemade song that will be my Xmas card, investing Barbara’s small hoard. Got the Crock Pot going (Swiss steak), woodpiles tarped against strong winds, all the Adirondack chairs withdrawn, stowed away, and to top it off, tonight I’ve got a sure sense of the onset of a cold: rheum, ache. Here I sit. Ten pm. Mud room. Scarred leather armchair by stove. No sound yet of rain on roof. * * * * October 29, 2014

Return to serious grant-writing efforts.

Brett in Sacramento today, to strategize Squaw financing with Jim and Carlin.

News of Galway’s death does arrive.

The day is lost somewhat to sadness. To disorientation.

Taking over Barbara’s nest egg, time on the phone with brokers. Online “entering data into fields.”

Finished with brief “Downtown” recording, and liking it – but not a whole lot. * * * * October 27, 2014

More days of clearing woods. Brett helps dragging slash out to meadow. The dog follows her back and forth, every trip, with inexhaustible curiosity and optimism, tail up.

(For some reason I think of the local Indian people here, the Maidu. They would have had dogs, and those dogs would have behaved in exactly the same way, cheerily.)

Sunday night, a movie by myself in town.

In the theatre on the main street, the projection-screen, because it’s draped like a bedsheet, has a wrinkle. So every camera-pan puts a wave in the landscape. And the Texas horizon (skimming in a windshield) flows through a warp.

Brett to Truckee for grant proposal, then she’ll stay in Squaw overnight.

Tree cutting afternoon.

My efficiency: In ninety minutes I am able to take down one big cedar, entirely limbed and bucked (half-cord yield of unsplit firewood).

Glad to have Pabby on the premises. Somebody on the property when chain-sawing

Because it’s not the big felling “crash” itself that’s so tricky, it’s after. Working on a down tree, delimbing it, the log may roll either direction, the chainsaw held up high at face-level – because sometimes the whole tree trunk is levitating, cushioned bouncily on its branches; heavy limbs squashed under pressure can spring out with the force of a beartrap, a decapitating force – so I really have to pick where to stand, where to dodge, whether to undercut, which direction I’ll ditch.

(I always think of Cavendish in these exploits. He’s my “Iron John,” the mountain man who was my first model of comportment in these generous mountains.)

It’s been a week of hauling all the garbage and recycling into the mud room during the nights, to bamboozle the bear (or at least disappoint him).

Watching mortgage rates fluctuate, because I’ve been putting off the refinancing. I’m such a high roller.

A small rain coming in today.

I spend only a couple of hours outside hauling accumulated slash from tree cutting.

The “violins” midi on that “Downtown” rendition.

* * * *

October 22, 2014

Re-sketched “Things” sex scene. Remembered the infant sleeping in the corner. Somehow I can get through many drafts, perfecting a scene’s characterization, tightening plot pins, answering or deepening questions – all the while forgetting I’d put a baby in the room. Turns out the baby was the fix, for the scene.

After work: a few revisions to Irvine Foundation letter, then more of cutting cedars beyond the oaks, then into town, groceries, bank. * * * *

October 21, 2014

Slept in late.

Still on “Things.” I admit to myself I’m dissatisfied with the sex scene. Sex scenes are by nature minefields of cliché and misconstruction and shallow spectacle. Oops, maybe that’s what sex is.

Always, I rejoice at any discovery of my own flaws, I rejoice and am fortified.

Anyway, left the situation alone till tomorrow.

Another afternoon cutting cedars, edge of s. meadow.

Again then, the invaluable hour, before dinner, of the cappuccino-plus-required-reading.

Mushrooms everywhere. A great year for mushrooms. The truffles in the front yard turn out to be true “truffles,” but a non-valuable kind, and also a non-tasty kind. According to local mycologist.

Today, two pieces of news arrived from Vermont, in this sequence:

Galway is giving a sizable gift of $$ to Squaw;

Galway is on Hospice.

* * * * October 21, 201

Saw the bear. 10:15 pm.

Happened to be idly internet-cruising in the mud room at this late hour – heard a bang in the garage.

He (she?) is cinnamon-colored, really immense, maybe the biggest I’ve seen, and timorous. He went scrambling away when I shouted at him “Begone!” (Squaw Valley bears are more blasé than these.) (Squaw Valley bears don’t scramble.)

Interesting: the silence: A bear can get his whole quarter-ton (?) bulk moving at top speed in an instant, yet stay totally soundless.

(Even a puppy’s paws on the meadow make a thump. Even the feet of a sprinting hen land with a pitty-pat. Not a bear. No sound from a 400-lb bear.)

(I can hope that tonight I gave him a bad experience and he won’t be back.) * * * * October 20, 2014, Monday

Chainsaw to SPD saw shop.

Burnett and Mimi visit. Long winey lunch in town at Lefty’s.

At the saw shop, rather than pay for resharpening I bought a 12-dollar file and resolved to learn how to do it myself.

Cavendish’s gift of kindling has lasted a long time: nicely milled quarter-round fir, kiln-dried and matchstick-explosive, 3am in the holy obscurity of the woodstove’s womb.

End of this Saturday: tennis court, hit for an hour with Dash. We’re both pretty good!

For dinner, Pabby is with Barbara in her cottage.

Here in the Big House we have cheap pork and potatoes, Pabby’s chard.

* * * *

October 17, 2014

Temperatures, in this fall-equinox season: Midnight it’s weirdly summery-damp, balmy. Then around dawn, the pressure of hard frost will have come down.

So, working in the mudroom I haven’t started the stove yet at 3 am. Then as the hours go along and the room gets colder, it gets to be time to start a fire but I haven’t done it yet, stuck in my chair, where just staying motionless conserves my envelope of heat, and at some point in the silence, a loud BONG comes from the two-ton upright piano beside me.

Goes on resonating forever. All 88 piano-strings clanging together, such a wall of sound is a very black sound.

* * * *

October 16, 2014

Home again, having visited Chris and Claudia and Matt and Mireya in Fairfax.

Also the wonderful new Exploratorium. * * * * October 14, 2014 San Francisco. Rain is expected, but the day dawns clear.

Coffee at Trieste. The same old Board of Directors is there, occupying the long row of center tables. (Their groggy warm, intermittent badinage. Pushing around the NY Times and the SF Chronicle. The slightly shamefaced way they, one by one, get up and push their chair in and begin their day elsewhere.)

Out on Columbus.

Pound of coffee beans at Roma. And a latte to bring home to Brett.

In the freshening air, direct sun is coming down the street. The city bus goes by (it’s the dread 30 Stockton), stuffed with morning-commute people, it’s all elbows and shoulders inside, thru plate-glass windows, it’s definitely not “fresh air” in there, standing-room-only – it looks hectic as Picasso’s Guernica inside. But a very dull Guernica, in bus-fluorescent dim twilight, so it’s really a whole different world: very slow: it’s the aquarium of restaurant lobsters sleepily bumping each other. Me, I’m the guy they glimpse outside looking unkempt in leather jacket. They’re glad they’re not me. They wouldn’t trade places with me for a million bucks. I don’t feel any special privilege, being out here in the fresh air. What they get, today, is what they love: the carrel, or cubicle, or cash-register, the gossip, the power they wield, as well as the justice they dispense, and their own justification, the wisdom they can exercise, all their siblings in the office with them (while the door to the corner office, “Dad’s,” stays shut). * * * * October 13, 2014

Leave for SF.

Arrive North Beach. Night. A mediocre “noodle house” has been installed in the premises of the old Amante on Green Street. It’s “trendy.”

A rock band will be rehearsing in the garage today. Parents have dropped off all the musicians (it’s a power-trio), and when I come up from work in the trailer, I find an empty paper sack on the kitchen table, with this receipt from the IGA grocer in town lying at the bottom of the sack: SPD MARKET 10/12/14 8:59am CINDY

RASPBERRY CHIA $3.29 F

SINGLE CRV $0.05 TF

BAKERY $1.89 F

BAKERY $0.89 F

BAKERY $0.99 F

CREAM CHEESE $0.49 F

CREAM CHEESE $0.49 F

CREAM CHEESE $0.49 F

BAKERY $1.09 F

BAKERY $1.09 F

BAKERY $1.09 F

KOMBUCHA $3.39 TF

SINGLE CRV $0.05 F

ORGAIN PROTEIN $3.19 F

SUBTOTAL $18.48

8.5% TAX $ 0.29

TOTAL $18.77

VISA $18.77 Pleasure in inspecting this, every detail, including the “Cindy.” Back to work in the trailer. October sun is thin but very warm.

Later:

Gretchen Bond’s daughter wants to get married in our meadow next June under the two big oak trees. They all come to scope the place out, fiance and fiancee and mom. Stand around in the very center of the meadow, under open sky, talking of the great sacramental day.

Real culinary triumph which nobody remarks on: pork tenderloin with sauce of our pears in brandy. The medallion squash from the garden, sautéed, thyme and sage. Things don’t get better than this.

* * * *

October 11, 2014

Huge wood rat, in my studio, is making thrashing sounds in the cabinet, where it’s caught in a heavy-duty trap I set, but not dying.

Question of ethics and personal fortitude: whether to somehow get the fellow outside on the open ground and put a stop to its misery.

Miscellaneous reflection about women. How it is they can descend so easily to humble and even saintly service, chores, compassion, unlike males who are often paralyzed by the hang-up of staying cool and keeping status (“status” being practical “uselessness”).

It would be because women will already have tasted complete and absolute power in ways a male never will. A girl or woman will have seen herself accede effortlessly to rulership over a man’s soul (for thus are men constituted). So, for a woman, who’s been there – (been there in spades) – the mirage of keeping status/being cool has not so much mysterious fascination.

* * * *

October 9, 2014

Horticulturist from the Ridge comes visiting. We’ve got these unidentifiable tough heirloom wild-ish pears, so the local Institute is looking into them. Along for the ride in his battered Subaru: his seven-week-old daughter and his wife (“brought along my lady”).

He says the pear tree is perfect for grafting scions, as they’re called.

He’ll be back in January. Gave him a cardboard file-box of ripe ones. The box had typing-paper taped to the side marked “BOB POEMS.” * * * *

October 8, 2014

3:55 am. Near-total eclipse of the moon. I’m of course awake for it.

I ordinarily only see the phenomenon of “shadows” in my own immediate neighborhood: the swing of a bird’s wingspan on the meadow, the mailbox and its post lying slain on the road pavement, the pool under the pickup truck where the dog likes to lie. The shadow of my own home-planet tonight, out there, is merely predictably round – doesn’t show much character at first – (not in the way I can glimpse my personal shadow on the road and detect my own doom in a typical slouch, or in a typical optimistic goof, the hunchback cunning dwarf down there I never pay any mind to) – until, near climax, around the epoch where the moon is shadowed totally, turning brown-red, it starts showing some human emotion. It’s aboriginal —total eclipse is such a menstrual filth color, it’s the unmistakable sunset of mortal “sin” cast by the typical smog of this damp, young planet, the planet where soil evolved. The only planet we know of where “moral responsibility” has evolved, in all the galaxies, all else glittering with sterility. * * * * October 4, 2014

Cat sleeping on my lap. 3 am. Tinkering with synth strings on Downtown rather than getting to work.

People I conversed happily with at great length, on days when the sun shone, now they’re up in Valhalla – Matt Krim (on vinyl swivel-chairs at Formica countertop in 1971, beside the sliding iron-framed door where California’s improbably warm air sighed), Don Carpenter in The Depot, my father of course, who had all the time in the world, Paul Davis, Oakley on the deck, Mitch Faber swinging his brilliant Stratocaster Wed nights at The Nevada Club then ordering up the double-bourbon, Kathi Goldmark.

“The dead” – and “death” – it used to be gruesome, imagined in Halloween shadows. “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out / The worms play pinochle in your snout.” Now, as I get the privilege of going deeper, farther, getting the entire E-Ticket ride, death is looking more like Valhalla: a perpetual existence in an extra-temporal summary, death a summary that is present to me at every moment of my apparent “living” “consciousness.” Morally, I already exist outside time. But just not yet in a literal sense.

Clean entire chicken premises.

Hook up the midi keyboard to get the strings right on “Downtown.”

Of all things: Planning the afternoon of this Saturday around a storewide 20%-off one-day sale at B&C Hardware. * * * * October 3, 2014

October now: there’ll be no more working in the trailer, where an electric space heater will be necessary after this point (1500 watts). In the mud room I get the woodstove going, four AM.

Have laid aside both versions of “Assistant” – to revisit instead “All Things.”

Afternoon: I’m on a 2-mile run, and three different Department-of-Forestry planes pass overhead, heading out over the river toward the San Juan Ridge. (Two are the CDF bombers, engines making the laboring roar of being laden with a ton of flame retardant.)

(Those planes are 1962 manufacture. Half-century old! I think of my 35-yr-old car as a peculiar inconvenience. Imagine how those pilots must feel.)

Then nothing comes of it. No smoke to the north, when I reach a promontory along the road to Katrina’s house. No “fire news” on the local internet.

* * * * October 1, 2014

What we are looking at, when we meet a human being face-to-face (bank teller, cheery FedEx courier, suave bartender, cool efficient secretary):

We’re looking at the radiant inevitability of Self, or Brahman(acc. Webster’s 3rd, Brahman is “the ultimate reality underlying all phenomena”);

An immediate economic threat in the form of a competitor for resources; also, sexual possibility, and economic opportunity: an associate in the age-old social contract, a partner in the evolutionary project, with whom moral hopes are shared. I suppose many of the most important elements of the association go back as far as when we were running in the same pack, or abiding in the same pod.

It was the Hindu saint Sri Ramana Maharshi who, when asked by supplicants Who will I be in my next life, and who was I in my past life? would respond:

“Well, who are you? First tell me that. Who am I talking to?”

This is a universe that (starting with rocks, carbon, silica, etc.) naturally and inevitably fruits, like a pear or apple tree, with “consciousness.”

* * * *

September 26, 2014

Brett to go so SF today for “Booktoberfest.” Just Barbara and me here.

More good rain showers. * * * *

September 25, 2014

Good solid rain, then clearing.

No more of El Dorado County’s wildfire smoke.

Stew.

* * * *

September 24, 2014

Limited work in morningtime.

Grant writing.

First pass at pears. Three boxes.

Pears are less abundant than last year but large. There’s some borer that has colonized, leaving a syrupy pinhole, so about a quarter of these pears won’t ripen correctly. Possible climate-change knock-on here: The higher average daily heat may favor this grub, and it’s a sign: the delicacy of climate equilibrium. Nature is so full of opportunists – (the plant and animal kingdoms are made up entirely of opportunists, all the super-successful competitors, from pinetree sprouts to e. coli, from crabgrass to Lady Gaga) – and local organisms adapt to a half-degree rise in average temperature with an instant migration – and in a single season could throw a whole ecosystem into some fresh arrangement.

Cease with the little barley-fodder operation, waiting for cooler days.

It seems to me that foundations – (going through their annual cycle of giving, like great oak trees leafing out, then turning golden, dropping their leaves, waiting then for next spring’s bud-popping event) – will already have already pretty much settled on how their money will be spent. If you have to knock on a door and ask and explain yourself at length, you’re already a latecomer. If there’s anybody out there who does want to support what you’re up to, they’ve already, long ago, noticed you, or even already written a check.

* * * *

September 22, 2014

“Tough beans”: that used to be an expression that meant ‘a dose of bad luck sometimes is inevitable.’ It was something of a rebuke when I was young. Tough bananas seemed like my generation’s clever, newer version of it, beans the more archaic version (and kind of mysterious!); I never wondered specifically about the expression’s origin. It seemed so ill-logical I just supposed it was meant to beabsurd: Tough Beans.

But so much of colloquialism originates in the agricultural life, and in ten-thousand-year-old familiarity. Now that beans grown in our own fenced-in soil are a regular basis for our diet – and now that, as chef de la cuisine, I often have to watch as plates of beans are set before the choosy 14-yr-old and the easily wounded 92-yr-old when the candles are lit and napkins unfolded – I see it’s a hard home-truth: nature sometimes serves up what we find hard to like. Sometimes there comes a handful of beans (these colder nights, the stalks thinning and paling) that no manner of boiling or braising or soaking will fix. But they’re what we’ve got. Brett and I have been spending the week unsuccessfully figuring ways to keep the Squaw Valley workshops solvent, and unsuccessfully applying for a second mortgage for this place, and this evening, tonight, we’re the two at the table who are happy to pick through our beans gratefully and shrewdly, masticating for the sweet pith, discarding husks, coming across a really great one now and then.

Dash is such a socially forward new freshman, he goes to a “Homecoming Dance,” weird native custom. Though he’ll be acquainted with nobody there. Ticket twenty dollars. In the harsh-lit-gym. There’ll be a DJ. Gamely, he chooses his clothes, accedes to his mother’s advice about dressing more formally. Together they Google images of Homecoming Dance outfits, and at last she drives over, drops him off at curb.

Later, mid-dance, Brett and I are here at home watching TV, and Brett texts Dash: How is it?

Response: “There are 8 people here.”

* * * *

September 18, 2014

A little light rain.

* * * *

September 17, 2014

Dash rises early alone, showers fast, makes a breakfast of granola and milk, and insists on walking, in the dark, the mile to the bus pick-up. It’s what his brother used to do. He says he wants to see the sun come up on Hirschman Pond. Age 14. * * * * September 15, 2014

This “diary” as thin-spread as intergalactic dust in the Internet – sometimes trivial, banal, inconsequential, sometimes hoping to be veritable eclogues – Such a literary form seems, in the new Internet civilization, as temporary as smoke signals but, also, permanent as a petroglyph. From now on, everybody gets his own petroglyph, his own roadside stele for any wayfarer a billion hears hence to pause and make out the inscription on.

Actually, I think it is a happy, utopian outcome. Though I grew up in a world where the only form of immortality was a hardcover sewn-binding deckle-edge hardcover book, attainable by only a very few, now anybody with a “device” can add his personal wisp to the cosmic mist of opinions. Which is fine!

It also implies a code of individual responsibility, an integrity, because every remark will be so infinitely consequential, rippling out in the polity of the shared future. I actually think of Teilhard de Chardin.

* * * *

Thinking of that farmer I met in Iowa, Clem, age 96, who was talking about commodities markets. The farmers in the 30s and 40s and 50s (his day) didn’t need the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, they made their own market in grain futures on Fridays, standing around in the shade of the big elevators, laying bets on September wheat or spring hog. It’s how old Clem made some of his considerable fortune.

* * * *

August 28, 2014

Done with another run-through of Immanence, emphasizing more unmistakably the narrator’s fatuousness, embedding the gold metaphor.

Finished with one editing job; take a first stab at another.

Eva here for Squaw work.

Sliced up the felled oak from cleared Erikson property: it amounts to one cartload.

Orzo and summer squash.

* * * *

August 27, 2014

Dinner is cooking. I’m standing in the old gate under the mulberry. At far end of meadow in the tall weeds, a coyote trots into view and stops. Between him and me, a handful of chickens are pecking in the meadow. They’re at a distance from me of about twenty yards. The coyote sees me on my far side, his prey between us – and for while he gauges his chances: he’s thinking about it – we’re both aware of each other, and oddly respect each other, though at this moment I’m sure he despises me a whole lot more, even, than I him. (Possibly whole lot more.) He turns and melts away.

* * * *

Thinking of that coyote and whether he “despises” me, as I said.

It’s possible that he kind of likes me too. Admires me. I’m sure that I, for my part, admire him. While he’s my enemy, on this acre of ground, I can see that he’s beautiful and valorous; and he might have his own grudging grants of admiration.

The field mouse that lives in fear of me in my trailer in the woods: he must see me as interesting, possibly admirable, at least godlike (while of course terrifying and horrible and regrettable).

Whether animals have “consciousness” or “emotions” is an open question among neuroscientists, philosophers, animal ethologists. Whether animals have “spiritual” elements in their makeup is an even farther-out consideration. But I believe it’s, at least, possible that the caritas of all created beings might extend even to the predator-prey gaze, or the competitor-across-the-open-meadow gaze. Caritas being fundamental to every grain and tremor.

(That is, the bear “kind of likes” the sparrow who pecks in the turf at a distance. The grazing old buck is “kind of happy to see” the squirrel hopping up a treetrunk.)

* * * *

“Caritas” = “Sorge” – They both mean love with connotations of worry. “Care” is a good translation.

* * * *

August 26, 2014

Little reverie about physics bumps into the funny notion that “location” is an illusion:

In standard geometry, one “point” seems to exist at a distance from another “point.” That is, space seems to intervene, stably, between the two points.

But for a photon departing Remotest Galaxy and arriving Here, the journey happens timelessly, instantly, so “departure” and “arrival” for that photon are the same instant, the same event. (Photons, at lightspeed, travel without time-passage.)

In this sense, Remotest Galaxy and Here are immediately adjacent. (At least for the lightbeam.)

Therefore, the lightbeam distorts geometry (makes space a kind of lens, shortening distances), and the Remotest Galaxy kisses Here. Or the lightbeam establishes a hyphen between “Remotest There” and “Here”.

So. Suppose you set it up as an axiom: that at the speed of light, there’s no “distance” between any “here” and any“there.” How, then, does one imagine real space? How does one map such a spacetime’s geometry? Or pull its drawstrings together, to make these hyphens?

Maybe, for a lightbeam, somehow all “locations” are simultaneous and co-incident.

In any case, evidently it’s not possible for us to imagine “real space.” Nevertheless, when we lift our eyes and look at a star (exposing retina to that twinkle), we’re seeing directly into that actual kaleidoscopic fiasco. We’re having the immediate experience, whatever it is.

* * * *

August 15, 2014

Jordan and Kara come for dinner. Like old times, as if we weren’t drawn in all directions by duties.

Bowls of chili outside, then we drag over the old terra cotta Mexican chimenea, to try actually lighting a fire in it. It’s fine – a bit of a rocket engine with three pieces of oak blazing inside – but then one learns that, maybe, it really should have just a few hot coals shoveled in, because the back side has developed a crevice, top-to-bottom vertically – and the belly (lower portion) is also crumbling, with lava radiance beaming orange thru the cracks, and we hose the thing down, as it falls apart.

Simply to touch forehead, breastbone, shoulder, shoulder. It should be easy.

Why isn’t it meaningless? And light, and easy, and no-problem?

Because if I did it, I would be desecrating something I hold sacred.

It isn’t “myself” that is sovereign, as if this were a matter of stiff-necked pride. (In fact I’m embarrassed, not proud, of this unsociable inability.) Instead, it’s a sovereignty of reason I must protect. Of which I’m a humble part.

* * * *

June 19, 2014

How ethics may be ascribed, in their origins, to the Anthropic Principle:

That the ethical imperatives arose from natural selection in evolution. Thus, “the unique witness of Existence” is one that evolved values. * * * *

June 17, 2014

Letter of Hope, to Hunter:

The world seems unfair and mysteriously locked-up. But:

Put your shoulder to the wheel, and you’ll end up with responsibilities/rewards.

Be a champion. Not in the sense of a gloating guy brandishing his trophy. Rather the “champion” who is simply a hard-working defender. Like that sprinkler-head in the bottom of the meadow. Other sprinkler-heads clog and get weak. This one sprinkler-head keeps on crazily not stopping, bang-bang-bang-bang. Be like that.

* * * *

June 8, 2014

Two kinds of “Sorge,” of two very different orders of magnitude:

the solicitude that is shared naturally among all creatures;

the ostensible “cosmological Original Motive” of a sole creator god.

Those two forms of love ought to be reconcilable (or even the one be subsumed into the other). But there’s no clear reasoning in such a reconciliation.

The first kind of “love” is in all likelihood an accident/artifact of biological evolution. Unrelated to any supposed creator god.

So these seem to be two very different kinds of “love,” and to suggest that they are related is to hope for a teleological – and anthropic – basis for all things.

* * * *

June 8, 2014

Squaw Valley.

Me, up here alone. On a quick trip in pickup.

The Truckee “self-storage” facility’s long alleys are vacantly sunlit.

Rows of roll-up doors.

The pleasure of acquainting myself with Andre and Kasha, visiting Poles. Learning of Poles’ universal penchant for home-curing their own meats, and historical deep mistrust of Russians.

With Aleksandra’s and Nico’s help, empty storage box.

Build bookstore premises, alone in Olympic House building, a Sunday Morning. Security-guard Jose still works there, on some “emeritus” basis, and it’s a pleasure to greet him. Each sizing up how much the other has aged, clasping handshake.

* * * *

June 7, 2014

“The Assistant” now exists in two complete forms: one with the historical framework, the other just a simple tale.

Happy to see my Henry James essay appear in The Threepenny.

* * * * Tad’s truck is being smogged and I’m waiting out the hour in Eric’s used book store, a cappuccino, reading.

Old disheveled man (long white beard, white hair worn long in ponytail, grimy athletic shoes, slept-in khakis) shambles in and searches bookshelves in the far corner, talking to himself, fists on hips: “Don’t tell me someone bought it!” Then he finds what he’s looking for, it’s tucked in sideways on a shelf, Mein Kampf, in a newish-looking paperback edition. Carries it to his armchair to curl up with it for a little while. Soon, his tea in paper cup is all sipped down to nothing, and he replaces the book on the shelf, screwing it into place just as he’d found it, and wanders away again, out the door into the sun. * * * *

May 25, 2014

The puppy is parading around with his rubber bone in his teeth, brandishing it at everyone in sheer pride. Brett has been observing that he can’t take a drink from his water dish: he tries, but the bone is in the way. It’s been going on all this afternoon. At last she confiscates the bone, and he drinks deeply for a long time, finally getting what he needed (deprived of what he’d wanted). * * * *

May 13, 2014

“The Assistant” all morning.

Toyota’s smog certification.

* * * *

paralyzing sadness. Can hardly move

* * * *

May 11, 2014

Mother’s Day – and B. and I go for little lunch on Bistro patio, then coffee down the street, and a tour of town’s sidewalks, dog on leash.

(She’s done with the marathon of Squaw admissions, deserves a vacation, gets herself a massage.)

In all AM hours, I’m back into The Assistant. Treating it again as straight narration.

Biologists, using laser tomography, have analyzed and modeled the simple flatworm brain. They have identified the 26 neurons in the worm and have actually built a complete working model of the worm’s nervous system, all its connections, but they just can’t get the model to “behave” like a worm. Let alone, to “learn.”

Whereas, if you lash a tool to an amputee’s stump, he learns to use it, even with finesse. Or put a “sonar echo-location” interface on a blind man: he learns to “see” with it.

It’s our assumptions that are the best thing about us, and the wisest thing.

* * * *

May 8, 2014

San Francisco. Day dawns clear, w/sun beaming along Union St. – then fogs over fast and turns cold. Coffee at the Trieste again. Again, all those middle-aged and elderly regulars are as familiar to me as if we’d all been in kindergarten together and we’d learned each other’s foibles there decades ago – and tics and sorenesses and foolish abundances and impetuous warmths. They, anyway, all seem to know each other like that. Reading newspapers side by side

Rest of the morning back at Macondray. Lots of cellphone negotiation over Squaw. An hour on the phone with Lisa horse-trading.

Party for Zyzzyva. Sam Barry harmonica, go out to noodle house with Glen D Gold, walk home alone in aerosol rain: it’s the cinematic noir San Francisco, Chinatown is deserted, cages pulled over storefronts, and I’m the Caucasian guy alone on the street, including brimmed hat and shiny pave. Foghorns.

* * * *

May 7, 2014

North Beach morning. Six in the morning, at the Trieste. Paul has glasses lined up on the counter. Slamming out the lattes and capps. He was a kid doing this exactsame thing thirty years ago. Still does it with élan. Fresh croissants haven’t arrived. So I take a stale-yesterday’s. Then the guy arrives with his flat cartons of flimsy pink cardboard string-tied. The juke box begins the day with Perry Como (“You’ll Never Walk Alone”), then Franco Corelli singing an aria from an Italian opera, then “I Did It My Way.” Tying his apron over his tummy is Tony, thirty-something but still a child – at home no doubt he’s still one of the putti in his large tumultuous family, even with blue beard-stubble. Using tongs he is moving fresh croissants up to the display, carefully, not dropping any, getting it right.

Move to Roma. The owner throws aside rag, comes out from behind the counter, settles down with his large, sleek young pal who owns all the parking lots in North Beach, and who says the strip-tease and porn clubs on Broadway are trying to make the neighborhood more family-friendly, buying up real estate to somehow accomplish that mixed-up goal.

Every human being I pass on Grant and Columbus and Union seems to have a bright inner warmth they’re muffling. The country-singer on the radio interview yesterday said, “You know what death is? Death is just ‘Howdy, Everybody!’”

* * * *

Polk Street in San Francisco: All the young wife/girlfriend beauties, at late-morning when they don’t have to be at work anywhere. Their yoga-pants hinds, their dogs on leashes. Do women (as is often said) really dress for each other, rather than for men? So the message to their sisters is, “I have more power than you”?

Well, I might like to think I’m above all that – that out in the country, I lead a life aloof from this carnival of envy/avarice/insult/temptation/competition. But then I see the wren at the curb hopping. And think of the finches and grosbeaks in my own meadow back home. Hopping and pecking, flipping away when another bird arrives. They’re just as deeply stuck in the envy/avarice/temptation/insult/competition. Sin seems to be the very center of the divine plan. Sin not just a necessary element, it’s the Whole Entire Enchilada.

* * * *

May 6, 2014

To SF.

Don Carpenter celebration. All the great and the good, the bright-eyed, the tired, the wise, the fond. Stackable chairs in rows, at the Book Club of California downtown.

Brautigan’s daughter Ianthe:

As a little tow-headed child on Haight Street (1967: the Summer of Love), she had been given a tall ice cream cone. And on the sidewalk, a stoned raggedy hippie said, “Hey, little girl, can I have your ice cream cone?” And she handed it across whole.

It’s 45 years later, and the woman still remembers that. She feels a little ripped-off, and actually she feels increasingly angry at that hippie, as the years go on, that asshole.

I think they were impressed with the look of a liberal education, lawns and stoas.

We spend a fine sunny day on the streets of Berkeley, merry as a Monkees TV-show-montage frolic, as if my mother hadn’t just died.

Led my three boys to People’s Park, trying to explain the history, the idealism. How once a generation believed that war could stop, and money needn’t rule; and so those hippies seceded from the Union.

A shirtless groundskeeper in People’s Park was hanging his head mournfully, using a rake that had about three prongs left, where once there had been fifty prongs, in the task of very slowly knocking bits of leaf-and-twig into a long-handled dustpan.

Telegraph Ave is the same as it ever was. Café Med is still there, still exactly unchanged, the exact same dead flies on the window sills, napkins in the chrome dispenser, all preserved intact under the pyroclastic ash blast (i.e., the sixties). The coffee is still great. Best in the world. The pleasure of sitting with my 14-yr-old son at the same window-table where Carol, the old African sage of the Avenue, once predicted my future.

* * * *

April 30, 2014

Mother died this morning. Rob calls to provide the bedside story, and to speak of the cremation arrangements; asks me to write the obituary. Which I proceed to do a bad useless job of.

Mowed big south meadow. Drove mower deep into the rough, trying to win back ground from blackberries and wild sweet peas. Over the years I realize, we’ve lost six or eight feet at every margin of that meadow.

Six pm is the hour of long shadows on the meadow: roast in oven – I can look out the rear window and see the Rainbird irrigation spurting and spurting, turning and turning, and look out the front window, to see Dash is standing out on the roadside where the cell reception is good, having an endless, exciting phone conversation. It is undoubtedly with a girl. He’s smiling broadly, as he never does. Shrugging and gesturing, none of the usual dark reserve. Doors of his soul are being opened

Moreover the Dow today reached a new record, 16,580. So long, mom.

* * * *

April 29, 2014

A pass at Don Carpenter’s’s elegy, rather than my own work.

Meet Swedish journalist in town at his hotel. Turns out I’m not to be part of his California book, it’s just that he read me and wanted to “Meet the Author.” Which is nice. We had beer at Cooper’s. Traveling with his publisher, who is quiet.

Rob phones, with news of mother’s fast decline.

* * * *

April 28, 2014

Back to Assistant, the dilemma there again: two books, one better and more difficult, the other more purely fun.

Clog in irrigation run-off is averted after hours and days of screwing around with it. Still it’s miraculous. In the hole-in-the-ground at roadside, the PVC outlet-pipe sings, “Bloop-bloop.” Water sparkles in its arc.

Re-master “Noel” removing bassiness.

All the while, the horse in the pasture behind me is galloping hard in long ellipses. Something’s got into him.

Fluttering in the turf under the picnic table: an old-fashioned Rolodex card, bleached by plenty of weather: it’s for “Ethan Canin” when he was in SF.

* * * *

April 26, 2014

First draft of Don Carpenter elegy.

Manure for all fruit trees.

Done with Squaw reading.

Move to trailer to begin siege of The Assistant, version I’m calling “eviscerated.”

Sausage and potato-leek for tonight. Beef stew for tomorrow.

* * * *

April 24, 2014

Hike to weir. Nevada Irrigation District has installed new metal box.

Clog persists in run-off line.

* * * *

April 23, 2014

Skies fair, breezy, getting unseasonably summery-hot.

As literature is futile, I find myself looking at lush tuft of new April bluestem tallgrass, broad-bladed and soft and green, and I think: A tuft of grass is something that is really an unmitigated success. That’s something you can get right. Just being a tuft of grass would be a proper devotion if actual life were arranged so that “not failing” were always the desirable outcome.

Loading pickup for trip to county dump – old office chair, disintegrating plastic, rotten boards. Fairport Convention on the radio.

Indoors, the kitchen phone rings, and Brett answers.

“Hello Mrs. Jones, you might remember me, this is Sean, and last fall I sold you some magnets and pendants.”

“You did?”

“They had the Squaw Valley logo printed on them.”

“I don’t remember any such purchase. I’m sure I’m not a customer. This is a home you’ve called.”

“No, you’re the customer. Remember all the merchandise said ‘Squaw Valley Cemetery.’ Printed in gold embossed.”

“There’s no “Squaw Valley Cemetery.’”

“Shit, I read this all fuckin’ wrong,” Sean says and hangs up fast. * * * * April 22, 2014

Home again in little mountains. No writing work. Dash stays home from school with a virus.

Rob calls from Iowa, with news of mother’s health bump. Reported to be minor. To be treated with an antacid.

Hauling wood: The wheel falls off the cart again. This time it’s the other wheel.

Chicken manure.

* * * *

April 21, 2014

Long talk with Joy. Crossroads for book. I could go to smaller-house publications, either with conventional narrative (all narrative intrusions excised) or with the more complicated version.

Once-in-a-lifetime pleasure of a walk with Dash: down Jones Street to Bay, out Bay to Embarcadero, visit to Exploratorium for an hour and a half, then up Broadway (sleazy as ever). Toward the end of the walk, Dash’s cough is coming back, and he’ll really have to rest. Brett, all the while, is gardening on the roof with Nico.

Being by the ocean. All these years. My lifespan. The ocean always cancels all accounts. Arraigns all intentions. I’ve been here a lot – Big Sur, Newport Beach, Stinson, Inverness, Bolinas – over the years. Still, a hands-in-pockets guy. As in that photo of me at seixteen, Big Sur, setting out for Alaska.

For dinner, on rooftop Nico roasts over coals some kind of Armenian confection of ground-lamb packed around little swords.

* * * *

April 19, 2014

Leave for sf. Galvanized drinking-trough lashed to top of little car.

* * * *

April 18, 2014

The two re-sharpened “narrative intrusion” chapters go to Joy.

Morning drive to Pearsons Small Engine, for mower parts. I’m so competent! The mower works! And the bad tufts can be mown down before SF trip.

Visit of Saharan Tuareg band to town, with J. Weil and C. Kiefer.

Tomorrow to San Francisco, with not a care in the world.

* * * *

April 16, 2014

The notion that “It doesn’t much matter whether you only witness a December moon from the back stoop, or travel to Athens to see the Parthenon in person. What matters is how you take it.”

Does this imply “It doesn’t much matter whether, in your lifespan, you see only the chute for aborted fetuses” — ?

* * * *

April 12, 2014

Finish all window reglazing.

In midst of quick improvement of “Assistant,” post rejection. Retrenchment strategy: more specificity in the theological playing-around.

Drop off one of the two galvanized drinking troughs at Luke-‘n’-Maggie’s, for transport to Macondray.

Pesto and roast asparagus, and I smoked a couple trout.

After dinner, outside it’s silent, a bandage to the soul. Under nearly full moon, the dust-gravel driveway is milky.

Arcturus coming up, thru eastern pines. Arcturus is 37 lightyears away. So I’m seeing it as it was 37 years ago.

Thirty-seven years ago (while Arcturus kept burning faithfully) here on Earth, it was 1977, and I was 23 years old, deeply disappointed, lost and alone in California.

Back home, more reglazing cracked windows. Took down storm windows from upper story.

Spent unwonted hour at “the dog park” standing around. Good stories from Kent Crockett about what a jerk Brautigan was.

Very heartening letter from Joy.

* * * *

The different pleasures:

After their café gig, Luke parts ways from Maggie.

She wanted to go after-partying with a bunch of people at Matteo’s Pub, where there was another band playing; she would have walked in there with her entourage, loaded with instrument cases, and a general toast would welcome her.

Luke, gloating: “I went home and had a single-malt Scotch with the dogs.”

* * * *

In Condon Park with Brett:

Out from the direction of the deeper woods, a 20-something guy, dusty, carrying his bedroll/sleeping-bag, coasting on his skateboard – he has obviously just wakened up, in the dust.

Skateboard underfoot, bedroll on shoulder.

I remark, with facetious admiration: “There ya go. Livin’ the dream.”

Brett agrees, “Nobody’s going to get him to modify his view of things,”

The arrested-development theme (the Heroic Baby Theme) is a little close-to-home, for a writer who (Don’s favorite Hollywood expression) “can’t get arrested.”

* * * *

April 6, 2014

Sunny Sunday. Warm dry spell setting in again.

(something I saw in Asian Art Museum, SF): —–

“The moon is in a high place, all levels are quiet

The monk’s heart holds half a Buddhist verse

Ten thousand destinies are empty”

* * * *

April 5, 2014

In wee hours of night: long email to Dan and Joy about the status of “The Assistant.”

Party at McKeans’. Fine piano/sax/trombone of Ludi Hinrichs and Randy, all evening. A privilege to be in the midst of.

It’s only nine o’clock pm, but already in the sky above the east pines is Arcturus, precursor to Scorpio and the summer sky, entry to all those summers on the Annex deck.

* * * *

April 3, 2014

Finished up Immanence draft.

Taxes to accountant: in the accountant’s conference room annually, always a quiet, valedictory 20 minutes, always a bowl of hard candies in center of her shining conference table.

Manuscript of “Immanence” to Joy, by email.

Carried the hen on a shovel and buried her under the pines.

The news from Joy is that “The Assistant” is now being rejected all over New York.

Paused by frontage road, for a meditative minute behind the windshield, quiet with engine killed, across the road is an old freeway-side cemetery.

And I see the big cement monolith of drawers they call a columbarium. But why is that word such a sweet word: because the Latin root columba (for dove) rustles a little bit with the beat of wings, ah, wings. And, too, a dovecote’s implied sodality. * * * * April 2, 2014

I’ve been reading Don’s posthumous novel, and it’s full of life. San Francisco and Portland bohemians in the late fifties and early sixties. It’s pressurized by Don’s ambition and jealousy and resentment, all forms of passionate love.

I still have a typescript of this same novel in my trunk, now 20 or 25 years later. I did nothing to help him with it at the time.

I’m reminded of how generous he was, and what a model. Don was an arhat. The austerity of his life was a dedication. In the years since, I find I’ve come to inhabit that same skinny carcass, somewhat. The simplicity of the apartment above the Depot in Mill Valley. The dish rack, the teaspoon, the tight-made-up bed (cot), Korean-War-army-style. The nickel-plated Glock 9-mm in the desk drawer, located precisely under the plane of his morning’s work. Which he said he was going to use “when the time comes.” That made perfect sense at that moment, and still does.

What we had in common. The two of us a pair of ill-raised, lucky boys, who however loved something.

* * * *

April 2, 2014

Disorganized day.

Badly-slept, skated through last section of Immanence, making superficial (and regrettable) changes, (to be rescinded tomorrow before sending to NY). Napped. Read a bit for Squaw.

Got out axe and shovel and gloves and began half-hour-long ordeal of merely circling around the project of killing the ailing buff cochin I’m fond of. Got as far as looping the thong around her neck on the block, then lost heart, a sudden cloud passes over the sun on an April morning, I loosen the noose. So instead, I’m going to let her sufferfor another day.

My guitar student. The school pickup. The bank-and-grocery trip.

* * * *

April 1, 2014

Stalks of asparagus poke thru the snow. This year we’re such half-assed inattentive homesteaders, we actually hadn’t watched the asparagus and some of it has already bolted.

Must next year enlarge asparagus beds, even five- or tenfold. And keep a better eye on it.

* * * *

March 31, 2014

Heavy snow.

Already now, some oaks have put out leaves, and the snow is fat and wet – therefore one expects downed PG&E lines and power failures.

Dinner in the cottage.

* * * *

News from NOAA: During this last week of March, the levels of carbon in atmosphere exceded 400 ppm. Moreover, this happened two months earlier than last year.

It’s all too easy for me to complain about others’ luxurious waste of resources, spreading of environmental death. It’s easy for me to be kosher, I’m here on these acres, where all my joy is. It isn’t necessary for me to get in a car and go somewhere, to have what I love. (Some people need to go to New York or Los Angeles to get to what they love.) This obscure place is like my bride. Not many people have this. I sit here and decree “The New Shabbiness.”

Is it possible for a greater number of people to devise a life somehow for themselves that doesn’t involve so much expenditure? That’s what a working economy ought to do. Our economy presently is set up to encourage expenditure. The new economic model will be different.

FUNCTION OF AN ECONOMY:

The function of an economy is to provide “happiness” (the greatest for the greatest number, acc. John Stuart Mill). An economy’s proper function is not to foment a widespread unhappiness that will generate economic activity. Commercial economy at present makes a project of arousing unthought-of desires and envy. If we lived in a world where people trusted their own hearts, maybe there would be less flying to Vegas. I only suggest this because “Vegas” can’t be supported anymore by the water table, or by the whole ecosystem, or (a stretch, here) by our plundering third-world societies for their resources.

(That is: Somewhere there’s a young woman dressed in modest, becoming chadhor driving an ox-cart filled with organic food that was grown to travel no more than twenty miles to be consumed. She can’t anymore support a Las Vegas.)

* * * *

The radio news (this news is at least a year old, actually) is that a certain flatworm seems to be immortal. It regenerates tissue with the DNA intact. Head regenerates. Tail regenerates. Whatever. So the same flatworm has existed for millennia. If there were such a thing as an immortal worm, what wisdom could it win by its perpetual consciousness? Well, these are flatworms under discussion, and their supreme wisdom might involve warmth and moisture. That would be the culmination of their wisdom. Of course homo sapiens, if he were immortal, would have far higher insights, nobler insights, wouldn’t he?

* * * *

March 30, 2014

Sunshine after an excellent rain.

Don’s novel comes in the mail, published twenty years posthumously.

I see from Wikipedia that he was born in 1931, so if he were alive for its publication today, he would be in his eighties. He was always so bedazzled by celebrity, subscribing to Variety and reading every issue closely – I don’t think the publication of this novel would have satisfied him.

* * * *

March 29, 2014

To Marin for board meeting.

Good big rain.

Upon return, Cavendish and Sands for dinner in the cottage. Tomato-basil pasta. * * * *

George Eliot: “Chance has an empire which reduces choice to a fool’s illusion.”

* * * *

March 27, 2014

Another sabbath from writing.

Record acoustic guitar part for Know-Well, with fine old parlor guitar of Barbara’s.

Fish (“Orange Roughy”) braised in leeks.

* * * *

With pieces of the dishwasher mechanism spread out around me, I spend another rainy afternoon on the kitchen floor, in position of the prone-with-rifle marksman from my old miniature army-guy set.

This goes on all afternoon, because the dishwasher’s food chopper mechanism must be disassembled/reassembled. And I think of my father, an excellent specimen of a man of his period, who in the 1940s and 50s wore an ascot, smoked a pipe, immigrant/businessman in Chicago, stood erect, always hired others to repair things, or else just bought new. Old Buddhist doctrine lists (not five) six “senses” keeping us in touch with the real world:

Vision

Touch

Smell

Taste

Hearing

Mind

* * * *

George Eliot: She’s so great with the eternal male-female fiasco:

“He held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man’s pre-eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in.”

That sentence is an awfully tidy knot.

(I wade through her pages annoyed by her “too-much-explanation” kind of narration, then she starts hitting her pace, throwing out things like that.)

* * * *

March 24, 2014

8:53 am. Monday. School day. Two puppies played in the meadow in great scrambling orbits.

About the most banal, close-focus things, I’m thrilled-and-glad all the time (raindrop of Northern California rain landing in a mug of coffee-with-milk; hook latch of shed dropping into eye-screw; cigarette smell in saloon doorway on Broad Street; pothole in gravel driveway filled with oatmeal-water reflecting canvas sky): sometimes it’s really, every minute, as if I’d just gotten off a plane that had nearly crashed, or I’d survived intergalactic time travel or a near-fatal illness, or come off the gangplank of an oceangoing ship. That everything is pretty much ok is an unbelievably lucky outcome.

* * * *

March 23, 2014

No writing. A typical sleepless night. All my doubts.

Watched an old Susskind video supposedly explaining the Higgs.

Went to church, first time in months.

Ran mile.

On kitchen table: this year’s school phone list, with a very old spot of pancake syrup: that sticky freckle collects the finest lone fibers in the household. The butter stands out all day, and the cats lick it into dwindling pyramidal shapes.

* * * *

March 21, 2014

Doctor visit: clean bill of health.

Chorizo soup. Put in lots of kale.

* * * *

March 20, 2014

The singularity of a lifespan – all the missed chances – I think those must be griefs and sorrows for everybody. Even the most envied, adulated person in the world, a topmost movie-actor or a Supreme Court justice or a wealthy inventor or a mother of good children. They ALL lie awake thinking: “I should have done grad-school differently, I should have gone to India, I should have proposed marriage. I should have moved to NYC, I never did spend winters harvesting sap and making maple syrup, I ought to have been an aquatic ecologist, a surgeon, a seminary student, I shouldn’t have declined a certain invitation.”

* * * *

March 18, 2014

Gravity waves detected. Front-page story in NY Times: read the pretty-good article closely, slowly, and with great pleasure, sitting in Mendocino Café in the sun, with the dog at my feet, immediate Pacific breeze flipping newspaper pages. Happy day on a happy day.

Neighbors have rented a big chipper. And I have been building a pile of slash by the road now as big as a small ranch-house. So Luke going by on his motorcycle U-turns and comes back, to suggest chipper sharing.

March 14, 2014

Antibiotics for all chickens. (sulfadimethoxone)

More pushing-back of east woods, limbing and felling cedars.

* * * *

March 13, 2014

Six o’clock in the morning, it’s still dark, and Scorpio is above the south pines! Apparently summer is coming.

* * * *

March 9, 2014

Sunday. Will recommence work on Immanence.

Rain coming in again. The Northern Sierra and Cascades are getting it (which need it).

A troubling internet-glitch: I keep trying to open something called Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, to get to a page called “Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds.” But every time I try, I get the blocking notice saying “That Page is Inaccessible.”

* * * *

Sometimes (in her moments of better lucidity) we can provoke Barbara to reminiscences. Recent recoveries:

When she was a girl on a Sacramento ranch, she had a pony of her own, a small gelding; this would have been the mid-1930s; the pony’s name was Bummer;

In high school she was a yell leader. “Yell leading” was what cheerleading was called then in California; and she was really good at it; she was the captain of the yell team;

Under the influence of a racy, sophisticated friend, she learned to remodel an ordinary brassiere by sewing fabric over the cups – and the same fabric over the straps to form “spaghetti straps” – and thus to fashion bikini tops to wear to parties (this in the fifties, when she was a grad-student wife in Iowa) (no doubt she and her friend were distracting as they wished to be, bringing St. Tropez to Iowa City.)

* * * *

March 8, 2014

Sunny Saturday morning.

At 8:30 am, I’m the only car coming down Broad Street – to take Dash to his river-trip drop-off – also, then, I’ll stop at drug store, and go to hospital lab for routine “panel” of blood indicators (for this, I’m fasting; not even allowed coffee. so I’m very pure).

I’m never in town at this hour. It certainly looks like Saturday morning. The town’s main street has one couple afoot, touristy-looking. Not a single parking meter is at work, all curbs empty. An awning is being unfurled by the National Hotel. The other sign of life is at Java John’s where the girl in the denim apron is hoicking folding chairs out onto the sidewalk in the sun and a little café table too. Long shadows. Edward Hopper of course. Damp air makes sunshine gauzy, ginger ale. Swing up Pine Street. Cross bridge. I’m filled with sadness for all the Saturdays I’ll never get back — reminded of riding in my father’s car to Boy Scout obligations; or seeking my friends when dew was still on lawns; or later in life, driving to the hardware store first thing, list in pocket. Plenty of Saturdays.

* * * *

Appreciation: Cavendish’s last visit here for dinner, he showed up with a bottle of wine and two cardboard boxes of choice kindling (narrow hardwood mill-ends from cabinetry), which lagniappe he treated like a compensation for his visit, though he’s always welcome. (The old excuse was needing to use our printer. Now, it turns out that the printer in his trailer, which the bear stepped on, has a crushed paper-feeder assembly but still works.)

I hadn’t realized at the time what an appreciable gift is good kindling. In all these cold weeks, I don’t go out to split uncooperative cedar with an axe, I stay indoors and very slowly deplete these two boxes.

* * * *

March 7, 2014

No rain for the next two days.

Sulfur-spray all pears in blossom.

Suit up (gas-mask-and-all) for thorough spray of diazinon: foundations of all buildings. I’m using up the last few historical ounces in this old bottle of a banned poison, which we inherited with the place — bottles of heavy opaque amber-brown glass, the paper labels’ glue so stale they’re flagging off.

Fresh feed and scratch and fodder.

Dash has stayed home from school today feeling punk – under a blanket in mud room binge-watching cute TV comedies.

“Infinities” are made out to be such a threat (to infinite-expansion model of cosmos), but I don’t understand: aren’t infinite and infinitesimal quantities exactly what integral and differential calculus address? And handle nicely? (Leibniz and Gauss and Newton have long since been here before us.) His whole discussion seems staged for drama and self-dramatization.

Recorded electric guitar part for “Noel.” Don’t like it. Will scratch it.

* * * *

Nobody among these popular physicists/philosophers knows of their antecedents, or can acknowledge who long ago already had these “new” ideas: Nietzsche, for the Eternal Return that, now, they’re calling “the multiverse.”

(Of course, said Nietzsche, if there is such a thing as the infinite, and if we’re to take it for its literal meaning, then there have already been an infinite number of iterations of this very moment, and this earth. And I will infinitely recur. And infinitely have already recurred. That was in the 1880s).

Or Max Tegmark’s apparent innocence of Parmenides’ doctrine. M. Tegmark thinks he invented the idea that the logos, if perfect as premised, must be eternal and unchanging, and that change and motion are illusions: enchantments only upon us creatures who live in “time and space.” This is Parmenides verbatim. And a modern philosopher ought to at least tip his hat, once. It’s an academic courtesy.

* * * *

March 3, 1014

Hunter writes (uses email, actually) to say that, for the first time ever, he’s starting to feel financially secure, so he’s going to make pasta.

****

(Wants my recipe for a smoked-salmon-and-peas pasta.)

* * * *

February 26, 2014

No work today. Steady, quiet rain.

Got up early and spent the morning putting really high-flown guitar tracks on “Noel,” as well as lengthening the whole recording by 64 bars. Then the program crashes and I lost all the work. Noon, and nothing to show. On a day I’d only meant to fritter doing pleasurable things.

* * * *

February 25, 2014

No writing. Up at five helping Dash with math and doing Squaw work.

Worked on “Noel.” Guitar track and harmonica track. Both satisfactory.

A bit of Squaw work; then all the afternoon clearing forest to the north by the road.

Taking out cedars I freed up a very old apple tree of George Merrill’s. The conifer forest had engulfed it, but now it will start producing.

Good big rain coming in. Brett accomplished a lot of housekeeping for the chickens, and I’ve saved, in the mining car, a good cubic yard of manure.

(Dinner of pork tenderloin with a sauce made from Maggie’n’Luke’s plums, preserved.)

* * * *

I’m forcing myself not to think about “Immanence,” but the of-course-crucial first line keeps bobbing up.

The first lines of a novel – how arbitrant and determinant! –

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we make the world.

Speak or act with an impure mind

And trouble will follow you:

As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart.

(the Dhammapada (its first lines!)

A novel (its first line) does have the job of introducing an impurity,

and the whole swaying creaking dung-loaded oxcart follows.

* * * *

February 24, 2014

Up very early. Read Max Tegmark. Listened with great pleasure a a long piece of Georg Friederich Haas’s in the mud room.

More pear pruning. More Squaw work on the Kindle.

Finished major pear pruning.

Pleasure of the afternoon is a familiar experience: in the shady kitchen my eyes are blinded by the outside sun, and I eat canned soup, peruse a Harper’s magazine.

* * *

February 23, 2014

No writing.

Laid down backing tracks for “Noel.”

Lots of Squaw work (on a Kindle).

Began pear pruning.

Party at old Indian Flat house.

‘S war schwer Deutsch zu sprechen.

* * * *

February 20, 2014

Get to end of “scouring draft” of Immanence.

Agree to film option for Ordinary Money, extremely small bucks but nice folks.

Laura Cerutti here for confab. Sandwiches on bricks.

Searle:

An experiment proving the existence of “subconscious motives” is thru post-hypnotic suggestion. Tell a subject that, when he wakes up, he’ll have a compulsion to give away money, open a window. Upon waking, he accomplishes these things, BUT he will have rational explanations: that man over there looks needy; it’s stuffy in this room; etc.

* * * *

February 19, 2014

Joy calls. Will start selling Assistant more widely in NY. (Having spoken to Jack. Who is very flexible and forgiving of a writer’s vagaries.)

Dinner of trout I’ve smoked here, garlic/olio spaghetti, kale/ginger.

* * * *

February 14, 2014

Sunshine, thin and damp.

Split oak and cleared brush.

(A school holiday, Dash and his friend spent the afternoon making a go-cart, using the old hand-cart for a chassis, dismantling skateboards for trucks.)

* * * *

February 16, 2014

Sunshine and warmth.

Immanence most the day.

Split oak.

* * * *

February 13, 2014

Rain.

Dinner at Sands’s with Dianne Federly.

A dozen wild turkeys, walking at the roadside on Ridge Road.

* * * *

February 11, 2014

Very difficult staying away from Immanence. Forced hiatus.

Frittering the mornings.

Afternoon, I mixed the 2-stroke fuel and went down through the woods (carrying also the Mason jar of precisely the refill I’d need) and got into carving up the big oak trunk sections, left by PG&E last year: easement below south woods. Spent a backbreaking great afternoon, figuring it out, levering the big cylinders with a galv.-iron pipe, taking some (unavoidable) chances with how the heavy log might sag when cut – ending up with oak rounds too big to move: will bring the wagon down there somehow, maybe tomorrow if it doesn’t rain. I cut them thinnish, tho’, for easier splitting, as this oak is like granite.

So, later, when we have to go to the regional high school for a “presentation,” I’m so desolated by the Authority of Mediocrity which I remember as high school, I sit there during the Welcome Video thinking for consolation of the great hours of my morning in that backbreaking work, with chainsaw screaming, a métier wherein I’m an artist, and that’s something they can’t take away from me, those principals and assistant principals and teachers, the whole world of competitive cliche: we’re in for four years of watching Dash ride that carwash tractor-belt. I’ll sleep soundly tonight, and sleep with moral comfort, because I got a start on creating a good oak cord today.\

Rain coming in. Will have to get the wagon hooked up and the oak moved in a good hurry.

* * * *

February 10, 2014

My short education in my septic tank’s secret routine work (this morning) makes me think of all the “culture” I live in, and profit by. The word culture, it turns out, comprises all my favorite things, the biota in my bowel, Bach-Plato-art, etc., music, mathematics, God, Parthenon, etc, the dirt underfoot, of course, and its bacterial recipe, the cheese in the fridge, the wine in the rack behind the stove, the bread in the breadbox, all culture.

(Reviewing that list. It’s possible God and math have to be excluded from the culture category. An exclusion controversial. If culture consists in “raw” elements untainted by metabolic processes.)

One could very well live on only seeds and grapejuice and milk. But life is kinder with bread/wine/cheese.

* * * *

February 10, 2014

Morning sun. Mist on meadows. A day of no work.

Septic tank is to be pumped, 9am.

Two septic pumper guys are friendly, informative and even avid on subjects like a tank’s sludge-scum ratio.

NASA:

Another young “edge-of-universe” galaxy has been found (by Hubble/Spitzer telescopes): it’s only 650 million years post-Big Bang. Red shift of 5. At that age, infancy, the typical galaxy (this newfound speck) is still miniscule and a prolific fountain of fresh stars. (It’s ten times smaller than this old Milky Way, and thirty times more productive of stars. “Ah, youth.”)

Last night late, after movie at Nevada Theater, the center of town is quiet, raining hard, looks deserted. The plush, dingy bar of the National Hotel was empty, lonely bartender greets us on springy toes.

The rain is loud outside. The back-bar possessed an open, okay wine, and I sat with pal while he complained of book business. His audiobook had been released – they didn’t recruit him to be the reader for it, or even contact him about it – and he dug it up on his iPhone, tapping at iTunes, to play it for me, wanting my definite judgment that the professional reader did sound gay.

* * * *

If the outer edges of visible universe, in all directions, exist at T=ZERO on the universe’s timeline; and if, the closer in you come to central-observer Earth, the further-along events in time are, (until you get to OURcentral old fossil, here, shabby, wet, homey, dirty, even stinky); then the universe from our POV is time-structured in the shape of a trampoline, soft in the middle, taut and new near the rim. Untried near the rim. Full-of-possibility near the rim.

Determinism: The picture does argue for a deterministic view of the timeflow from past to future: the future exists right here in the form of “us,” us here, having evolved consciousness from these rocks. (Esp. because that remote edge-of-universe sees us as in our fresh debut, looking small and hard; and sees itself as the aging soft center.)

* * * *

February 9, 2014

Rain unstopping.

Movie in town, Italian, Fellini-like.

George comes by with cookies for Barbara. Recites Robbie Burns’s lament for a deceased lamb.

* * * *

February 7, 2014

Rain: six inches in a weekend.

* * * *

February 5, 2014

Slow, quiet, sad day.

Snow looking to come in all day, but not arriving. Everything outside is the grey-dusted color of winter-interstate-highway asphalt. The cold really locks down hard in late afternoon, in town.

At home, run all the space heaters at top setting, snack on toast spread w/jam of last summer’s pears.

* * * *

February 4. 2014

The septic tank that isn’t working is the new one, not the old one.

The old one (the ancient one) faithfully as ever is doing its thankless job.

Baited mousetrap in chicken run.

Brett in Squaw all day to look at Sierra College campus, lunch with Joanne.

All morning on “Immanence,” most importantly taking out deflating explanations.

But the workday was cut short (or shot-holes-in) by care of the unhappy new dog.

* * * *

February 3, 2014

Sunshine is back.

Tunneling rodents are getting the chicken feed, and the older septic tank appears to be leaking.

Finished “The Assistant” for Joy’s sales efforts in NY. Sent it off. Fwshhh.

Long conversation with Herb Gold in SF, so deaf and opinionated and impervious, in his nineties sharp-witted, sitting at home on Broadway, answering the phone. He taught in Iowa in ’57, and I got all his great gossip (gossip whose freshness expiration-date is fifty-seven years past, but is all perfectly intact) corroborating my “Assistant” narration.

Tad’s pick-up to the garage, for oil-and-lube. I next door, for hour in bookstore.

Pork roast braised Azerbaijani is a disappointment.

* * * *

February 2, 2014

Seeing the new-rescued dog get accustomed to the idea that it isn’t a betraying dream to live in a house where love fails not. (Gradually ceasing to flinch when petted. Coming to sleep in deeper repose.) Seeing that’s the adaptation I made twenty-five years ago.

* * * *

February 1, 2014

Saturday cold and clear, morning.

Dashiell’s concert today: song for soprano and piano.

(renewed delight in rediscovery of Middlemarch. Sometimes she does take risks, if gentle ones, surprising sexual subtext, explicitly anatomical, she’s such a racy dame, it’s really almost like potty-humor she’s having such fun with it.)

* * * *

January 29, 2014

Rain comes in, not with the sudden breeze-churning or then fat drops. Rather the classic Pacific storm-system, a heavy mist during the morning condenses to aerosol sweeping, all soundless, and at last the sound of the eaves’ drip on the tin porchroof begins, and by noon it will be raging. Right now, a plain grey bird perches on bare twig of mulberry, just looking around himself, looking left, looking right, not going anywhere.

Facing some central, foundational wonkiness now suddenly, in the Immanence ms. Which until this point had been breezy.

I almost congratulate myself on reaching the perspective that, on such a morning, I might just as tolerably be in Sierra Nevada Hospital in pain staring at ceiling, as here staring at these pixels. Of course, not true.But a bracing thought.

* * * *

At last, a little rain is predicted.

In all my reading, I’m unreasonably implacable. Having thrown Cheever book across the room, and picked up Eliot for relief, I find now can’t take her either. It’s her intrusive author-judgments and little homilies, quaint and of course “acerbic.” Nothing wrong with acerbic. I could take them if they were acerbic, but they’re not. They’re cookie-cutter acerbic, all about silly females and fatuous provincial types.

* * * *

January 28, 2014

Must open all four lids on septic tanks, as I’m suspecting leaks.

Cavendish to borrow truck.

Chipotle soup. Then meeting at co-op housing about highschool choices for Dash.

* * * *

January 27, 2014

Discovery that Hunter and all his grad-school-bound friends, last summer, burned up much of the good oak firewood I felled and split, at such cost of effort, so they could have picturesque summer bonfires here.

Tonight, I actually despair of reading the last ten pages of a fellow-writer’s novel (it’s almost never that I don’t dutifully finish) – Cheever’s Wapshot thing – as so meretricious and bad-values-infused, so damaging of human nature, so flippant and superficial, that since an old copy of “Middlemarch” has turned up in Hunter’s bookshelf, I’ll go back to rereading that lady’s sharp pick-offs.

* * * *

January 27, 2014

A small rain is predicted for later this week.

(Local fields that had produced avg. 500 pounds of fodder per acre have this year produced 40 pounds per acre. Typical of the kinds of very consequential damage a drought will do, to everybody’s economy down the line.)

* * * *

January 25, 2014

Drought goes on.

“Immanence” all day.

Clearing blackberries.

Dinner of a chicken that was old, tough, fat, led a life of idleness, a life over-prolonged in the barnyard.

Then, watching a “Masterpiece Theatre” in Barbara’s cottage. How strictly efficient is dramatic narrative. (You have to be a habitual TV-watcher in order to, habitually, forgive it its stylized limitations.) (But of course the same is true of the novel, opera, oil painting.) Every scene is maybe eighteen seconds (moving among all the subplots), and that 18-second bit churns through dire life-changing events, among 2-D characters, narrative like a handjob. Even British storytelling: infected by the Hollywood “on-the-nose” economy of scene.

Outside, in the meadow, the stars are advancing toward their spring display, Sirius well above the horizon.

* * * *

Wittgenstein (his translator’s weird punctuation intact):

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

5.61 Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.

We cannot therefore say in logic: This and this there is in the world, and that there is not. For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case since otherwise logic must get outside the limits of the world: that is, if it could consider these limits from the other side also.

What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think.

5.62 This remark provides a key to the question, to what extent solipsism is a truth. In fact what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of the world.

* * * *

January 20, 2014

Hot dry weather continues.

School holiday (MLK day).

Dashiell’s friends are making music in the mud room.

The irrigation system, which I hiked today, is non-functional in three places:

At the ditch, steel screen filter of the weir has finally rusted to loose scabs and swatches, letting all things flow through.

At the Y-split uphill on Spencers’ easement, the run-off still has no screen.

Below there, the run-off pipe is still clogged.

Got the second of the three remedied today. Also repaired broken wire on hen-house gate electricity.

New Sequoia book: I realize old Edgar has an inveterate selfishness: self-aggrandizement.

(Seems I can construct malicious/mischievous characters best by recourse to personal experience. I have to think of uncharitable and unfair analyses I once made, of actual acquaintances in my life. Putting “bad motives” into action (which is obligation of storyteller) runs athwart a regular habitual benignity in human nature.)

* * * *

January 18, 2014

Brett brings home an unfortunate puppy from Elk Grove.

Me: working all morning nicely on the new Sequoia book.

After that, it’s me and Barbara and the dobro, all afternoon.

* * * *

January 17, 2014

Joy is emailing in the middle of the night, and then phoning at six AM, with lots of praise for The Assistant.

* * * *

January 17, 2014

Pleasures of having animals.

On a very tiny scale, I’ve got livestock here, and last night, coming up from putting the hens away safe from coyotes, I got a sense of what farmers have always enjoyed:

In a world of atrocities (race wars, class exploitation, genteel rape and other kinds, even insults on the gradeschool playgrounds), I’ve created a space where justice and peace rule. At this point, I’m an experienced little chicken-rancher, and things don’t go wrong. I’ve got it down. “Peace” and “justice” are so rare (so non-existent) they seem like mythological concepts sometimes.

But here I’ve got some happy animals, and I can see that every farmer for thousands of years – old guy in Iowa, or an old guy in Bavaria, or in the Roman provinces or in some Russian shtetl – has had this satisfaction, even if unconscious, a slightly but distinctly moral pleasure.

* * * *

Certainly plenty of religious meditations are for the superstitious and the credulous. Such folk get their thrills and consolations. However, some few want to explore such notions (eschatological notions, soteriological notions) who are not interested in those thrills and consolations. Such a more rational seeker needs (besides plenty of stamina) two important knacks: the “negative capability” praised by Keats – that is, the ability to entertain in the mind two opposed ideas simultaneously without flipping an “on/off” switch on one or on the other (i.e., an ability to keep holding that toggle firmly in the middle position). And secondly, similarly, a tremendous tolerance of uncertainty, tolerance of undecidability, equal to an Einstein’s.

Such strengths of mind – (really tensile strengths: adaptability and humor and empathy) – can look like weaknesses; they can look like equivocation and wishy-washyness. So the conversation about fundamental matters is always at risk of a kind of anomie. Of limp, affable anomie. What inquirer, out there, can be both tender and incisive?

* * * *

January 14, 2014

The NY Times mentions today (re: climate change):

Anybody buying a home along the Virginia shore these days will have to bear in mind that sea level will have risen one foot by the time their 30-yr mortgages are getting paid off.

So here it is, the long-predicted wave. Those improvident, those indulgent, those “non-smart” people back there, the only way to communicate with them is to grab them by the Economic Considerations. The metaphor, there, to be explicit, is to “gonads,” what get grabbed. Some people have only economic considerations for gonads.

I continue to feel that there’s a regional East-Coast/West-Coast opposition going on. I’ve been out here for years wearing layered-up sweaters in my own living room (as have plenty of my fellow citizens), installing me-sufficient solar panels, etc, while in “The East” people have been scoffing as if such measures are sissy.

Could it be true – as “back east” culture is portrayed in movies – that they all think they want to be Captains of Industry back there? Blazing penthouses and fuel-wasteful cars and a private jet are what people WANT? Foreign wars of Insult and puppet dictators, to pay for it all? Such delusions – delusions of the non-smart – are something the wiser will be paying for.

* * * *

January 12, 2014

Bit of work on “Tamalpais/Sequoia Novel”

Barbara’s birthday party.

Dash starts out his afternoon at a “band rehearsal” at a friend’s house, but concludes it in cross-county hike bushwhacking with his keyboard friend and his bass-playing friend, high-spirited, going on after dark, and after dinnertime, getting far out of cellphone range, until coalition of parents have to intercept the adventurers at a highway crossing, sore and rosy and hungry in the dark.

* * * *

January 11, 2014

Small rain.

Not enough.

* * * *

January 9, 2014

Timewasting.

Torturous depression of inactivity.

Fiddling with ”Immanence.”

Idea for Tamalpais novel. But don’t want to touch it.

Clear duff thatch under pines out front.

Hens roam and peck all afternoon.

Brett rids herself of little white dog –a friend will take it. It is cold in old house.

Smoke four big trout (burning applewood chips I happen to have, because I took out the tree by the garden).

(reading old minor Cheever. He was really such a tawdry writer. No values. All display. All aiming-to-charm. Occasional brilliance.)

* * * *

January 8, 2014

Up with fiction that risks showing the heart of hope, but unsentimentally.

Up with fiction that esteems the reader and doesn’t engage in tricks.

* * * *

January 8, 2014

Dead stop after work on “Immanence.”

Nothing to say. The cupboard is empty.

My car continues to make ominous noise. Today: the trip to the mechanic in his desolate gulch by the cement plant.

The irrigation is still entirely dry, due to maintenance work in tributary canals at upper elevations. But even if it were flowing, the mystery clog of last fall remains a problem unsolved.

* * * *

January 4, 2014

Wake late.

“Immanence.”

Approved Threepenny’s proofs of the short “magic” piece.

Brett goes dog-hunting.

Split the rest of the cedar.

Topped up the transmission fluid in the Benz at last. Not such a big ordeal.

* * * *

January 3, 2014

Awake at three.

“Immanence.”

Threepenny at last sends copyedited draft of James review.

Hood up on Benz: Proper German transmission fluid, but I have no proper funnel.

Dash to guitar lesson.

Old Wolf stove is lowered by block-and-tackle from pickup bed to the turf before the potting-shed bay. Mounted on Oakley’s old red bricks. One day it will warm a cottage.

Complain to anyone who will listen, about wastefulness of this purchase. Our grandparents would have fixed the old stove. They wouldn’t have bought something shiny-and-(predictably)-shoddy. The old restaurant-grade Wolf stove is indestructible.

Install the shiny new one in a single afternoon, with help from Dirk.

The take-out sushi/sashimi from Truckee Safeway is better – better by far! – than most sushi bars’ over-complicated sloppy victuals.

Drive back downhill, with the sooty old Wolf stove on the pickup bed. Which is so great, I will build a cottage around it someday.

Brett must go all the way down to Manteca, in the pickup, to buy a kitchen stove. The old Wolf oven in Squaw Valley has been “red-tagged,” i.e., condemned, by the local gas provider. I hate it when she’s on the road alone, and of course I should have been the one to make the trip. I remain here as Barbara’s minder.

Sands’s New Years party. We arrive late, and also leave early, but a party is a welcome lull. Scottish people know lots of verses to Auld Lang Syne, gnarly ones, George especially, whose mouth when he enters his brogue travels to the side of his beard, one eye growing bigger and sharper than the other. (I think Scottish warriors called that weirding.)

In conversation in the corner, I get another little glimpse of what it would be like to have mystical accesses: In long talk with a female of décolletage most poignant and compelling like in high school (which has nothing to do with mysticism) I’m saying I’ve always wanted to live in Berlin – O, if I were young and rich indeed — I want to live an entire ninety-year llifespan in seme Berlin neighborhood, and always get my coffee and rolls at the same place. And in London. And in Rome, and New York of course. And any Palatine, Illinois, or Plano, TX, you might care to name. Entire lifespans for each of those places, too – washing my car in the driveway, or picking up women in the T.G.I Fridays bar, or driving my linen-delivery truck in the Texas sun-up.

And she and I go riffing on this, and I realize that being stuck in Nevada City, Calif., is equivalent to any other of those fates – that I’d have to go on being “myself” whether in the South of France or in a Norwegian fjord or on a SF Bay tugboat, — so I realize this woman and I are the same person (plus/minus the décolletage’s little burden and a few other incidentals). I am the same as the peddler in the souk and the thief in the mercado and the nurse in the poor-clinic and the actor lining up hopelessly for a cattle-call in LA. All one. All one many-armed deity. Many-faced.

* * * *

December 29, 2013

First day home:

Sunday. Woke late. No work today. Tomorrow “Immanence.”

Email and desk miscellany.

Stack half-cord stovewood.

Replenish woodbox.

Diagnose Benz noise as, possibly, low power steering fluid.

* * * *

December 29, 2013

Home again.

Last night home in the cottage, post-airplanes, post-airports, post-baggage-claim, post-freeways, in the silence my ears rang.

At first light on this cold morning, I went around checking things. Then, under oaks at far-west meadow before sun-up, sitting in molded-plastic chair, I heard the commonest sound: from McClellan’s place down the road, a wooden board knock. (Like, say, the bang of a 2×4 being dropped.) At seven AM, McClellan was getting a start on something. At that point, all this place’s peacefulness came back upon me, and upon my about-to-take-flight shoulderblades. And moreover, I knew I’d get back to work.

* * * *

December 28, 2013

Arizona. A borrowed house in Tubac. Five AM.

Living room. I’d been distracted from reading and thought: Didn’t the coffee-machine finish long ago? How did it get started again? – because it turns out that Dashiell, on the couch far from the reading-lamp, is snoring with exactly the coffee machine’s noise: slurping rhythmic dredging. Precisely a coffee machine.

* * * *

Arizona: Tumacacory: I’ve now been to a new place that will furnish an assurance that there are good places: the old mission at Tumacacory, the level desert horizon as seen thru the ruined-adobe window in the rectory (now roofless). These acres of dead stump-orchard are a place where once Apaches menaced and shot with arrows any tame missionary children they could catch who were playing too far out from the mission walls. Now nevermore. Wind and sun, thru the frame of unglazed window sticks in adobe.

* * * *

Reading Marxist-feminist criticism all this week, disturbed by the starkly brutal interpretation of human nature. Only innocents could envision such cynicism, indulge such pessimism. Of course it could all be quite accurate, while not productive. I.e., not to be turned-to. In the Tubac museum I consider the photos of the native Pima (O’odham) life that existed here for ten thousand years without change, without innovation. The Pima were a sedentary agricultural people (corn-beans-squash), who in the last two centuries were invaded by Apaches.

I try to see a revelation of human nature, in the photos on museum walls. Doorway of wickiup hut: woman with basket. Beside her, defiant stubborn-looking toddler and big sister. At the moment the camera-shutter snapped, a dog walks past the hearth, freely, gregariously, looking well-fed, tail in the “expecting-the-best” upright flourish. Everybody in this picture seems to have a sense of his or her rights and proper deserts.

It’s hard to decide who was exploiting whom (as in Marx-Fem interp), for instance in the marriage of Dallas Jones and Mary Lou Link, or in the marriage of Oakley Hall and Barbara Edinger, or even in this my own marriage. My sense is, pretty much anybody can think he’s getting the short end of the stick, in any relationship. Everybody in any partnership can get the sense the other party is in fuller control. Settling the “who’s-exploiting-whom” riddle is a mug’s game, and real human beings give it up pretty fast, just because they’re too busy with creative endeavors of their own. You didn’t get into this life-game (or at any rate, you’re not staying in the game) with the intention of getting a result that must accord with the prinicples of “justice.” Face it, everything’s gravy.

You scan those of Pima families closely. Human nature is human nature wherever you go, and surely there were unhappy, angry, regrettable men there, too. But in these pictures, the dog can sleep peacefully, or trot by underfoot, and the child can complain with the assurance of its entitlement. “Happy families are all alike.”

* * *

December 26, 2013

“Thou hast not given water to the weary to drink, and thou has witholden bread from the hungry. But as for the mighty man, he had the earth; and the honourable man dwelt in it.”

(This is the reason the bible is “literature”: it sees both sides. Anybody who reads it word-for-word can see, it has a dialectic, and even contains atheism and despair beautifully.)

(Very few humans you ever meet – almost none! – are capable of containing an idea opposing their own. Even the young are bigoted. Especially the young, maybe. Maybe only the old fogeys, if they’re smart, are wishy-washy.)

* * * *

Job remembering his happier years:

“My root was spread out by the waters, and the dew lay all night upon my branch.”

* * * *

“Innocence”: frankly admiring of the Catholic principle (dogma) that sin saturates and swamps all human thought and endeavor.

Well, fine. Such observations about “sin” are simply accurate.

However, the danger of resting in that recognition – (sin’s old sovereignty) – is that there’s a pious resignation, a hopelessness that carries a little contentment inside, a fatalism, a weary getting-off-the-hook in confessing that we have “left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us.”

Blah blah. There’s a diagnosis that rules out possibility of cure.

* * * *

Arizona. Sunset, above the little canyons they call “dry washes.”

Interesting acoustic phenomenon: you think you’ve experienced silence; but never like out in the desert. A silence where, for fifty miles in every direction, nothing is stirring is very different from the silence of a walled room. Acoustically very strange and wonderful. Why should all this space feel so different? Possibly because my own breath and heartbeat aren’t reflected/answered. They’re dissolved in space. In any case, a total snuffing-out of the soul. (Origin of (sanscrit word) nirvana: a “blowing-out” as a candle is blown out.)

* * * *

December 21, 2013

Both boys home in Nevada City for Christmas (Dash 13, Hunter 22) both in bedrooms with doors closed and music playing. Interesting thing about having children: how actual they are, how their bulk occupies space, and will go on doing so, in faraway times and places – and that the physical bulk hadn’t existed except for the faith and works of me and Brett. The two boys are not only “real,” they bulk up as more fully real than their dwindling parents.

* * * * December 20, 2013

Came across an unfamiliar word that I actually didn’t care to look up!

Very strange. Age sixty now.

In a critical-theory essay the word “rebarbative” described some supposedly unpleasant quality of a certain school of lit-crit (one among Marxist deconstruction’s various schools). Maybe, at sixty now, there are certain concepts in the discursive repertoire that I foresee no use for. Like, who cares about rebarbative? The context implies “rebarbative” means disagreeable, truculent, prickly. I’m reading in the old leather armchair by the stove in the mudroom. No doubt “rebarbative” has an interesting Latin derivation, but the dictionary is three rooms away, and I’ve got maybe twenty years left, of productive intellectual activity, and maybe I’m in a new dogleg of life, where it’s excess baggage to learn about this particularly ungraceful, Latin-derived, scoffing aspersion “rebarbative.”

No. The real truth of my preference for ignorance is this: Once you learn a new word, there’s always the risk you might find yourself someday using it. One day rebarbative’ll pop, like a frog, easily out of your mouth.

Morning: quiet exchange of X-mas gifts. (To get the potlatch out of the way before the Arizona trip.)

Good guitar for dash, good overcoat for Hunter.

Barbara last night was restless and worried, disoriented, up and down all night. At three in the morning I went looking for Brett, found all lights on in the cottage, and Brett there comforting frightened Barbara in bed.

* * * *

December 19, 2013

Morning: a bit of time polishing the Henry James review.

Most the afternoon: finish splitting cedar firewood in west meadow (while chickens, in all bland confidence, mill around the axe-blows and chopping block).

He that observeth the wind shall not sow and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.

* * * *

December 15, 2013

San Francisco.

Cigarette alone on Polk Street. (Never did grow up. Still here.)

I’ve been obsessed for years with religions’ claims, and it seems to me the only raison d’etre for any “religion” – (though they all certainly have a variety of raisons d’etre) – the one-and-only legitimate and legitimizing reason is mysticism. Mysticism of the 200-proof kind. All religions’ other institutional furniture and game-rules are extraneous. They’re all just the pitons and crampons and ropes.

Catholicism seems an instance: a very mystical philosophy from the ground up.

All the rest of ethical, practical imperatives, following from Humil, Char, Empath.

(Amidst all the places we say goodbye having scarcely known each other: train platforms and airport departure gates, hospital beds and door-frames.)

Of course this organism is unequipped ever to have “mystical knowledge.” It’s not in this organism’s nature.

Nor is “knowability” in mystical truth’s nature.

Even thrilling guesses are not, honestly, in this flesh’s cognitive or sensory equipment. The biggest thrill is, merely, the absence of any “faith” or “truth.” But setting one’s sights on an unrisen sun does educate the intentions. That there must be such a thing as “the love that rules the sun and other stars” is only a kind of very cerebral, abstract induction.

* * * *

December 12, 2013

In San Francisco. Macondray Lane.

Reading Roger Penrose again constantly stunned. Also in places not-getting-it. Awake early, coffee, wall-heater. Can hardly read a sentence without pausing in long brain-aneurism.

Window replacement in rear.

Retaining-wall.

Interview with Mill Valley guy.

Jason to record bass part on “my mobile studio.”

Xmas party on Jordan Street, Nion and Leslie.

Etc.

* * * *

December 11, 2013

To SF. * * * *

December 10, 2013

Completely lost an hour or so this morning, on an interactive website following the rover Curiosity on Mars surface. (Should be getting together James review.)

Website is amazing. I can click forward and follow each day of the robot’s visit, so far, to Mars. Look close at Martian ground under the wheels each day. Check out odd rocks and dry rivulets. See sunsets. The two moons hurtling. Wander to new spots for look-about. It’s like Nevada on Mars, it’s like the roadside off Highway 50 (but absent foliage). Got to know the local Martian landmarks very well, Mount Sharp, Yellowknife Bay, etc. Sand dunes blown into ripple pattern (by the stiff wind of carbon dioxide). I’m now intimate with five acres of Mars, about as intimate as I am with the flat area above the falls in Shirley Canyon, the spot where Dash and Hunter, both, used to like halting the hike to rest and scale little boulders. Or set cedar-bark boats sailing in the creek’s current.

Turn off water at pump house. Billy across the road has a PVC cap of the right diameter, and a can of that purple PVC glue I can borrow. It works. (This will be the week of my undertaking and triumphing over projects I don’t have any training or talent in, , here and in SF.)

My personal walk-about on Mars, which in the end required about two hours. But time verywell spent.

Hearing on the radio (cause of emotion): “Nelson Mandela will be buried in his childhood village.” (because on this still-saveable planet, we have things called “childhood villages,” to be returned-to, at the end) * * * *

December 7, 2013

A foot of dry, light snow overnight.

Five AM, with push-broom, pulling snow off henhouse enclosure, in thumping loaves plopping to the ground. Snow all up my pajama sleeves. * * * *

December 4, 2013

Post-rain. Cold snap will be deep and lasting.

Back on Immanence. (“All Things,” with abbreviated front end, minus its epigraphs, has gone to agent.)

Afternoon: splitting cedar that was felled last year in south end of south meadow. The slapdash lecturer John Searle is on my earbuds, on the mind-body problem. With split stovewood, filled the tractor wagon under oaks. Then had to quit, to go accomplish school pick-up.

* * * *

December 2, 2013

The days after Thanksgiving. For storing leftovers, the unheated front half of the house is a good refrigerator-temperature, turkey carcass on the coffee table, dishrag-shrouded.

Joan the widow is to drive to Squaw, next morning. The sad thought is, “Male and female He made them.” Neurologists say, yes, the guy’s brain is wired front-to-back for perception and action; the woman’s brain is wired side-to-side for evaluation and association – and there goes Joan, at the wheel of her old green Subaru, alone up Highway 20, with her side-to-side wiring.

* * * *

November 27, 2013

Nico and Aleksandra from SF.

Cracked crab.

* * * *

November 24, 2013

Brett, driving home alone from Squaw, strikes and kills two fawns on Highway 20 above the Five Mile House. She’s shook-up and weepy but accepts glass of wine, sits in cottage couch, watches “Project Runway” on television.

* * * *

November 23, 2013

Saturday.

“All Things.”

Firewood: last of the cord of energy-logs from garage.

Mow down meadows (redundantly).

Begin recording “Noel” melody: dobro.

Recurrent, persistent idea that “anthropic” principle, if extended infinitely, does account for “teleological” solutions – but always at risk of solipsism.

* * * * November 20, 2013

Rain continues, good and steady and loud.

Nickel-plated “dobro” to Luke Wilson, for bridge adjustments.

At the far end of deep-rutted road, Luke’s hut atelier, in the rain: inside on ceiling, hanging from clamps everywhere are violins’ and cellos’ toasty-mellow panels, diagrammatically exploded .

Beef stew, w/ marjoram (store-bought vegetables.)

* * *

November 19, 2013

Rain arrives. Maybe two days’ worth? Will maybe amount to an inch here.

All morning, Dash (these days, a sweatshirt hood is always up over Dash’s head) has been holed up in the unheated north parts of the house, working on something.

He comes in kitchen: “Can I rhyme ‘retribution’ with ‘nuisance’?”

(Permissive mother says, “Of course you can, sweetheart” – when his oppressive dogmatic father has just finished saying no you can’t.)

* * * *

Harvest party at olive ranch. I go alone. Brett stays home. Jalopy makes the long trip just fine. (As I go, John Searle is on the iPod ear-buds, lecturing on the mind-body thing, settling everybody’s hash.)

(During lunch in the olive grove, it turns out that the quiet guitarist with hi-compression Stratocaster w/volume pedal, serving up the best parts, was Nina Gerber!)

Lots of affectionate talk about Kathi Goldmark, and tributes from the dais and song dedications. The ranch’s new vintage is named in commemoration of Kathi.

Something comes back to me: when she got me that radio-show gig and I showed up, she insisted on paying for lunch at the Ferry Building cafe. She shouldn’t have, we’re both definitely non-rich, both still kids, and the protocol would have been splitting it. But with serene immovability, she insisted on buying, and I should have known then, the cancer was back.

* * *

November 16, 2013

Every evening lately Venus hangs up long after dusk above west oaks. For most of this month (around aphelion I suppose?) it’s been lingering letting the sun get far, far ahead, but now will begin plunging each night following faster and faster after her. * * * *

* * *

November 13, 2013

Barbara is ninety, sits in the sun. Brimmed straw hat. The flow of talk from National Public Radio is exactly right. Rescue efforts go on for those unfortunate poor people in the Philippines. A diamond has sold for eighty million dollars. A woman in England has undertaken to read one novel from every country in the world, during the course of a year, and she hasn’t regretted it. Chimpanzees exhibit empathy.

* * * *

November 9, 2013

Saturday. Sunny.

Too warm for November. Sun is hot, but low in the pines to the south. This is like some alien planet.

Furnish upstairs room as workspace for coming cold times.

Tear out summer crops – tomatoes and squash and beans.

Cut out apple tree to east of gardens – then wander property with grumbling chainsaw, looking for saplings of cedar, hawthorn, madrone, to clear.

Envy thou not the better-accomplished. You may never know what privations – what lacerations or amputations – made bravery necessary. And invention necessary. Also, in the case of one pitied, you may never know what secret indulgences, what joys and delights, what special permissions and compromises, went along with the mediocrity compromise. There’s misery in the house on the hill, and peace in the hovel.

Home from Squaw, I spend the afternoon catching up.

(My SEP-IRA, which I have ignored, turns out to have a little more than I’d thought. I’m rich! rich! rich! We’re all in the Rich-as-Croesus category.)

Here at home it’s just us kids, eating macaroni and watching the “Johnny Darko” movie.

* * * *

November 7, 2013

To Squaw, if only to get the bamboo off the Annex deck.

* * *

November 5, 2013

Helping Dash with math.

The lamplight, the held breath, the linear equations with their slopes and y-intercepts – (“y=mx+b”) – how the slant lies on the grid.

Then reading over – (strictly for admiration purposes) – his Language-Arts paragraph of book summary/analysis.

* * * *

November 1, 2013

Midst of another string of warm sunny days.
“Immanence” expands like Big Bang.

Bright-and-early, Shana from down the road comes for a couple of boxes of pears, some to return to us, as a little galette or pear butter. She rides off with them, on a fancy stretched-long bike w/saddlebags.

Dash’s guitar lesson. Jamie wants to sell us an expensive guitar.

Read Henry James’s “Letters” in coffee shop.

Out on lower Commercial Street, in the zone of coffee shops tolerant of sidewalk-layabout kids and amiable potheads, everybody is standing, pointing, heads tilted back. It’s UFO’s – and I see it too: point of light, like a daytime star, but drifting (Looks like Venus. However, Venus happens to be underfoot at this hour).

A perfect hometown hallucination here, to be seen only from the foot of Commercial Street. Jaded Dashiell doesn’t even bother to look up, heading to meet girlfriends Savannah, Kiley, Sienna.

* * * *

Last week outside hardware store I happened to glimpse the usual parking-lot wren, grey or brown or whatever, small as a tablespoonful, as usual patrolling under the grilles of parked cars, the usual aplomb. Been on my mind for years, parking-lot wrens. I think I’ve seen, and watched, a lot of parking lot wrens/sparrows?/finches? – because for years unpublished and maybe unpublishable, I spent a lot of hours in coffee-and-donut establishments on malls, in this strange place California. Perpetual newcomer (eternal newcomer) could rent a few hours’ work-space for the price of a cup of coffee. So thru a plate-glass window I’ve watched a lot of parking lot wrens during times my pen was waiting above ruled legal pads. I’ve watched them forage or just stroll under the tires of parked cars, my confederates somehow, in all kinds of weather out there. I truly, no-kidding, greet them in all collegiality.

* * * *

Thistle standing on the damp west meadow, its amethyst star — and every time I come across a thistle I think of a particular missed opportunity. When Cavendish and Sands were planning, once, to marry, I was in default position to preside as “celebrant,” and I’d pictured a theme – a theme extending to wedding décor, why not? – of the alliance of the Scottish thistle and the English rose. Roses and thistles everywhere entwined.

* * * *

October 28, 2013

Harper’s magazine this month (stack of mags beside toilet) reviews a slew of new books on the subject of “Immortality” (“the Hope and Hokum of”).

This morning after nice hard rain it’s still dark and soaked outside. Carrying paper plate of last night’s leftovers, I go out to free the hens and replenish pullets’ feed.

I wonder. How can we, desiring immortality, want our own personal “consciousness” to persist indefinitely when, right now, we’re “conscious” in such a blinkered way? This floating bodiless consciousness we’re expecting to enjoy, what’s it supposed to be conscious of? (Still the juicy hamburger? The new season of cable shows?) * * * *

October 27, 2013

Sunday. Looks like rain at last.

Deep into “Immanence” again.

Brett’s long conversation with Hunter. He’s dating somebody now, a good thing for him, in loneliness of grad school especially, someone for consolation and confidences and a little true perspective.

Last of the summer-squash (I was out there with a flashlight raiding the garden) goes into stir fry w/bean curd.

Dash, after dinner, guitar: command performance: he slows down Tarrega’s Lagrima, and grinds it, so it makes Barbara sigh, everybody get teary.

* * * *

Must have been a bear who dug up bees’ underground nest in west meadow. Must have been honey in there. (It’s Googlable: certain bees do that.) Hexagonal waxen combs spread around scrubby meadow.
* * * *

Flutter of white hair. Discovered Barbara lost, down past the potting shed, pushing her walker, the walker’s little saddlebag stocked with a couple of old lace napkins, various pairs of reading glasses, silver spoons and knife and teacup, a folded New Yorker for reading matter.

I can romance her back up to the house, while preserving her dignity, by playing guitar for her, not ask why run away from home.

As we go (a long trudge, back uphill toward the cottage, pushing the walker), I tell her Brett is down with the chickens, that she’s probably refurnishing their whole habitat, that she loves those birds, brings them treats.

“Well,” she grumbles, “Could be worse.”

* * * *

October 25, 2013

Hot sunny days persist.

Tonight Dash goes to a “dance”: 8:00 to 10:00, in an elementary-school gym, with recorded music. (Chaperone-to-dancer ratio, about 1-4.)

Purchase of Halloween costume, top hat, etc.

“The Assistant” has gone off to Joy. * * * *

* * * *

October 23, 2013

How quiet it can get.

This morning at four am I check the calendar, see that it’s the day of bringing the recycling bin out to the road (comes around twice every month).

And I catch myself thinking, well, it’s a day for taking a shower, washing hair, putting on my better clothes!

* * *

I think there’s no society out here on this road. Then a U.C. professor has found the place – he says it’s unlisted, but we’re here and findable – fun conversationalist, wanting a signed copy of Calif’s Over so he can send it to his pal Jackson Browne! Then I get going on afternoon run, down the road, and a scooter goes by, it’s Katrina, and she slows down while I run, Are there still pears? Yes, in boxes on the garage floor. So I get her smiley thumbs-up sign and she accelerates and goes around the bend.

* * * *

The contrasts in light I’m sentimental about:

galactic light (stars and local sun) (also reflected off moons and planets): it would be radiation from fusion. Photon-neutrino purity

by contrast, warm oxidation here on earth at way, waylower temps. The dirty buttery gold of candles and fireplaces and campfires and smudge pots and old-fashioned incandescence of lightbulbs, which are also oxidation, i.e., smoldering-glow of tungsten filament.

the difference between starlight and lampllight

(excluding fluorescence)

* * * *

October 22, 2013

Another dry warm day.

Brett (needing break from Squaw staff-planning) is rigging up partition to keep new pullets safe from old hens.

Various lengths of George Merrill’s old rabbit-fencing are still rolled up in the woods behind the outhouse, for our reuse, rusty but strong.

From distant Highway 49: the sound of a long slash of an automobile as it travels through rough woods. Then it stops, and the sound of a car horn begins. Then, like a guitar amp stuck on feedback, the car horn sound doesn’t stop, a pair of bugle notes in harmony, sustaining that harmony, on and on, it goes on forever, somebody is leaning permanently against the steering wheel.

This is too far through the woods for us to be any help. So all we can do is call 911.

* * * *

October 21, 2013

Brett’s contentment – coming home from the feed store with fresh barley fodder, having watched the piglets there (in their pen where they wait for a buyer/fattener/butcher) this morning waking up and frolicking for no special reason.

* * * *

(Farmer’s euphemism for what happens to pigs when they’re all fattened up: they “go to market.” Nice expression. It’s what happens to me, too, after I die: I go to market.) * * * * Great old words that have died the death of trivial oversimplification, now disqualified from use:

Wonky

Redact

Niggardly

Those were useful words. They are irreplaceable.

“Irreplaceable” means irreplaceable. You who have thoughtlessly smudged them over – the journalists, the politically correct, the govt. bureaucraps – have no idea what precision and delight you’ve swept away. Precision and delight were invisible to you.

* * * *

October 20, 2013

Sunday. Brett is to come back from SF.

No writing today.

Slept in.

Got a start on, and dawdled over, a paragraph describing “All Things” to help Joy in selling it around NY.

Spent the entire morning dismantling/reassembling dishwasher all over kitchen floor. On the radio, the Car Guys Click-and-Clack yukked it up, then “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” churned through its cycles like any other kitchen appliance, then “Prairie Companion” theme song was cranking up. At the very foundation of the dishwasher the food-grinder device was impossible to reassemble. Still I’m in pajamas. Final success was a simple snap.

Looks like all apples, tho’ sweet, are uniformly small and wormy, all going to cider.

When Brett comes home we do in fact get the big juicer rolling.

* * * *

Behind the stove is the wine rack (just a wooden wine-crate).

And on its protruding post hang the V-shaped wishbones of the passing years’ roast chickens. I save them there, to dry and become brittle, but I guess nobody is interested in proving his own secret wish against another person’s, so they go hanging there. All these years. All those unpetitioned, unrisked hopes. Hunter now at Georgetown studying. Dash here in middle school with a rock band of his own.

* * *

Something anybody knows who is in dire extremity:

“despair” and “faith” seem like opposed words but they describe the same condition.

In free-fall the choice gets made.

(Certain saintly people would abide always in “extremity” and are never out of it, are always in free-fall.)

* * * *

October 18, 2013

On the little kitchen lawn fifty green-plastic chairs, wet with hose water, crowd together tilting this way and that, to dry in the sun. Looks like a café.

The sound system is set up on bed of pick-up, and it tests out O.K. (Tammy Wynette’s “Almost Persuaded.”)

Brett is preparing her poetry-reading, in SF Mission District.

I will stay home as husbandman for the weekend, while she who makes everything beautiful here will be absent, making some other scene beautiful.

Her endless project of “curing” thrift-shop cast iron pans with multiple flax-oil rubbings and four-hour saunas in the oven at 500 degrees – it’s been going on for a week and still litters the kitchens.

* * * *

October 17, 2013

Stars really do never move! Amazing.

My background-feeling (that something could change up there) arises because, lately more and more, I attend so closely, as if something really might change, at any minute – and in fact there are little events, Jupiter’s shift-of-place, or Mars’s; the moon’s new shape each night, and new debut; a falling star. But as for the far-off stars, nothing moves. The very same Orion will be striking the same pose long after I’m gone. And has been, too, since Eratosthanes, and since Avicenna, since pre-Cambian epoch when nobody was here to look up. That’s pretty amazing.

(esp. considering Hubble expansion, 22 km/sec per megaparsec)

And consider all these added wobbles:

Earth motion: 30 k/sec around sun

Sun motion: 220 k/sec moving around galactic center

Galaxy motion: We are falling into Leo at 371 kilometers/second\

Still, Orion has “always” looked, and will “always” look, the same.

* * *

October 15, 2013

The radio’s incidental shred of news is that Nigerian government soldiers have just killed 950 civilians, who were in detention, some by shooting them in the legs and letting them bleed to death.

Many such little messes are unavoidable if we’re going to get (via Royal Dutch Shell) gasoline every day.

Meanwhile, a long fine conversation with my agent.

The Pope would say it’s “sin” we’re swimming through; the Dalai Lama would say it’s “delusion.” This morning at five am all this trouble seems like the Lord’s form of delight, even the Niger river, poisoned for hundreds of miles along its inner lagoons.

***

October 15, 2013

Dash’s week of school break.

Tomatoes are still producing. Crown squash is unstoppable.

Two pounds of cod, packed deep in miso paste for four days (w/sugar and rice wine).

* * * *

October 13, 2013

Soft little rain in the night.

Quarter- to half-inch accumulation in bed of pickup truck, in seat of plastic garden chair, in the old Radio Flyer wagon on the woodpile, inside the plastic galoshes by the gate.

Clear sky at five AM. And in the dark, the sound of the creek in the ravine.

* * * *

October 10, 2013

Here, we are boarding three visiting hens, traumatized survivors of last night’s bear invasion on henhouse across the road at the Spencers’.

These are same as bears elsewhere this fall, a large mother and her two full-grown cubs.

* * * *

October 6, 2013

More pears. Giving ’em away all over the valley.

(Funny superstition-encounter: today I walked through the old “gate-to-nowhere” stile in an unaccustomed direction – south to north – and immediately had the reflection, I wonder if that reverses some enchantment that may have been laid upon me the first itme I walked thru it, in the other direction.)

I’m idling at a stoplight in (locally named) neighborhood Burger Basin, in my 35-yr-old black Mercedes (tailpipe perhaps releasing puffs of its black vegetable-oil smoke?). A spider descends, mid-air, between my face and the windshield, hanging from the sun-visor. It had been riding around with me since we left my garage. With the sickle of a finger I catch the silken thread – and hoist it out through the open window and hang it on the rear-view mirror out there.

The light changes to green and I notice my spider relocation has been watched by a small child, astonished, in the neighboring car’s back seat.

One roving mega-predator changes entire ecology of neighborhood. (Therefore what effect does a horde of humans have?)

I’d been noticing for some years how my planting small-scale garden crops changes the local populations of birds, deer, insects, rabbits, mice – whole families set up house depending on this new resource.

This fall around here we’ve got a newly arrived mother bear and her two cubs. At our place, they tore off henhouse wall and carried off four hens in one night. Then two more hens on another night.

Now our neighbor a full mile away – (bears’ foraging range!) – has lost ten chickens in a single night. (Subsequently, husband and son slept in parked car overnight as guardians, and caught the bear family plundering.) Everywhere fruit trees are denuded (in my case the lower branches of an apple and all of my Italian plums, so far).

So if that’s what a bear family can do, just in basic subsistence nutrition, how much more does mass-human activity flip all relationships and instantly, all-but-irreversibly intoxicate ecosystems.

* * * *

The for-sale sign on the acreage at the corner of Newtown Road (with its added duct-tape motto: “OLD MAN READY TO DEAL”) has long since fallen face-down in the weeds at the roadside. It’s still lying there. Today as we drive by in after-school carpool, all the boys are saying seriously, sentimentally, they’d like to come out and resurrect it. (A stage of adolescence that’s important, moralistic, the onset of sentimentality.)

* * * *

September 26, 2013

Definition of art:

Art is any artifact that holds the attention

(provided there’s no practical motive for paying attention).

E.g., my attention is held by a Robert Frost poem, a Nirvana song, a football game, a TV commercial (yes, art, yes), a long novel. None of these things pays me back in practical or, say, economic ways. I attend to them for no purpose. (That TV commercial may be for stupid hamburgers, or cars I’ll never want; but I may anyhow watch avidly.

By contrast: My attention is held by a corner stoplight, but only till it turns green, then I’m done with it. A stoplight is not art.

(A stoplight could be art if Warhol or Lichtenstein put it in a museum. Then it might hold my attention for some other reason than my waiting for it to turn green so I could go.)

* * * *

September 25, 2013

Brett and Dash must drive all the way to Truckee for the final orthopedist visit. (The summer’s broken wrist.)

Here, I stop work midday, then bring in more pears.

It’s an idyll. Leaf-filtered sunlight provides the distinctive earthly wavelength of good cheer and serenity. Chlorophyll-color is therapy. Attuned to soothe the retina of this particular forest-dwelling biped. And there am I! (lifted on ladder) up in the cloud of that rustling light. A pear is ready for picking and box-ripening when its stem separates silently, without a tug, right at the spur-joint. Lift the fruit gently at a 45-degree bend. See if it moves out to join you. Leave it be if it doesn’t succumb easy. From last year, a knack comes back into my wrist: it’s like the wishbone-snapping geometry in its angular leverage. I can tell by the tensile resistance of the stem, before I’ve even levered the fruit, whether the angle will snap at the spur or resist and insist on its tough virginity. To be left alone.

So all afternoon, while it’s still summer here in my pear branches (elev. 2800), Brett and Dash going over Donner Pass are encountering snow. I spend a little time worrying – checking CalTrans webcams of I-80, opening phone for texts from them. I’ve made an especially good stew as a way of magically sealing their fate as homecomers. And they do. Halfway through Barbara’s “PBS News Hour,” the dog is yipping and the mudroom door makes its (characteristically Dash) slam.

* * * *

September 24, 2013

Summer, still. Now it’s end of day, five-thirty, September light, sun low across unmowed meadow, narrow wrought-iron chair (my astronomical observatory) stands out in meadow’s middle in tall grass, iced Sauv. Blanc getting a start on my head, meat thawing (for curry), Dash’s bedroom door closed where, to accompaniment of Bon Hiver, he does his homework. The chickens are still in their pied a terre, the pears are in pickup-truck bed (they’re in old cardboard file-boxes, one of them with the taped sign “WORKSHOP #7,” in 72-point font of Apple font menu; the other side scrawled in Sharpie pen: “Binders – take to Squaw).

The pears will start to be a lot of work now, boxes lining up on garage floor.

Today I fought back the meadow’s western blackberry wall, tall and dense, a scrimmage line, moved it back about five feet, along a thirty-foot-long front.

Excellent progress on Immanence.

* * * *

September 22, 2013

Sunny fine day, post-rain.

The usual brief lurking in church’s back pew. (Perplexing verse in Luke about the Cunning Steward, a perplexity for sermonizer, too.) Then the deft exit from pew, unseen.

Back to work on “Immanence.” Forget about the ditch-irrigation anxieties for the day.

About fifteen vultures have been circling above a spot in the woods to south and east. When I walk to that end of the meadow I get the distinct scent of something rotting, but only far downslope. Something large seems to have died in our woods but I haven’t the curiosity – (nor anything at stake!) (even though it’s “my” woods) – and won’t go searching through the rain-drippy glistening gorse and hawthorn, fern and pathfinder and vetch and vinca.

Working on Immanence for the afternoon, I’m dogged by this sorrow: that I’m writing a book whose plot has no artificial contrivances, its characters realistic men and women. Seems like, the better the art gets (and the more fraud-free), the smaller the audience. (Sexist notion: maybe this is because women are the readers in the marketplace these days, and women love to be lied to, deplore flatfooted sincerity.) I’ve been reading magazine reviews of Pynchon’s new mash-up. (Now there’s a “boy’s writer”, though.) Editors assign thirty-year-olds as reviewers (they’ve got the right Dungeons-and-Dragons education; the proper awe in sensing that they missed out on real literature, on authenticity, but have mastered all the “signifiers” and can flourish them dazzlingly, in this long epoch of infinitely deflationary counterfeits). What people want is Pynchon’s kind of cheap fabric with tinsel woven in. This thing I’m working on in all its verity and asperity will look simply stunted or “unimaginative.” And in a way, isstunted and unimaginative, as those are negative-connoted adjectives for its truest virtues.

* * * *

September 21, 2013

Lots of rain, snow-level down to 5000 feet.

A Saturday with no writing.

Mostly fixing irrigation, in pouring rain.

The problem is across the road in the Y-split on the Spencer property.

Getting my exercise climbing up and down Spencers’ hill carrying tools, changing jackets every half-hour because there’s no such thing as true waterproofing. All things get soaked and cold pretty fast, in a real rain.

Making extra posole.

Reading Nagel’s “View from Nowhere.”

* * * *

September 20, 2013

Rain showers to come, here. Above 7000 ft, snow.

Here, unaccustomed twilight tennis in warmth. Posole.

* * * *

September 18, 2013

More blackberries.

* * * *

September 17, 2013

Worked on “Assistant” all morning. Cleared blackberries all afternoon.

From compost area working back towards shed. Under the figs. And vines that had choked the lane.

* * * *

September 16, 2013

Most people are still spending weekends at the mall. (Shopping’s the big event? The art-and-craft one practices?) Weekdays at full-time jobs to finance that.

Sorting nails pulled from fence boards: Any that aren’t rusted or badly bent go into the pickle jar. This isn’t an “admonition” it’s merely a prediction of what’s to come. “thrifty, artful, elegant, resourceful, plain.”

* * * *

September 15, 2013

Four-in-the-morning, very starry sky. Jupiter is champagne-colored. Sunday morning at this time: especial silence on all totally-dark highways roundabout. No trucks into mountains, up 20 or up 49. Crickets, though: their huge dunes of sound keep me oriented in local space.

Yesterday, for purchase of hens, with Brett, to flat dusty fence-crisscrossed neighborhood of Rough and Ready. Then today she’s in a state of happiness building a new roost, in her food-stained, long skirt, her clogs of lime green, blouse looking slept-in, hair tied up. Brandishing power tools like the clanging, ringing SkilSaw, and the Makita cordless drill her brother left behind – chickens all around her ankles curious, she couldn’t be happier, she’ll be fifty-two this year.

Privileges of solitude: clothes clean-or-dirty strewn all over the living room floor, radio too loud, candlelight. Salmon and kale.

* * * *

August 16, 2013

Six o’clock. Evening TV news in Barbara’s cottage, she drinking her fake wine in stemmed glass. Just her and me.
PBS News Hour has a report on the Kepler telescope in orbit – its technical problems: the clockwork that adjusts its aim is broken. Stuck. So this great telescope will have a perfect view of just a single random direction in space, eternally. NASA doesn’t know how to save or re-purpose its stare.
Then an “Amber Alert” storms over the audio, with all fanfare of the rude emergency-bulletin blasts. Two children have been abducted, Angel Rosales, age 3, and Liliana Ramirez, age 9. And in nine California and Nevada counties we are all to be on the lookout for a black late-model Ford Mustang. (They have been snatched by their father and their stepmother, somehow.)
The bulletin takes forever, blasting out the Kepler-telescope report. Then, once finished, it must be repeated, so I’m just going to miss the news. The Kepler has been finding dozens and dozens of exo-planets, potentially habitable planets, i.e., nice planets, orbiting stars about the size of our sun. But now I’m missing the Kepler news and I’m just impatient with those luckless children Liliana and Angel, speeding down a highway with their unreasonable parents.

* * * *

August 15, 2013

Brett leaves for DC.
Dash to have cast removed, requiring long trip thru the woods to Truckee doctor.
Stop by Squaw house for baby-monitor, phones, etc.

* * * *

August 14, 2013

Grown-ups’ freedom and quiet returns to these acres: Dashiell has gone via carpool to first day of school. (His arm still in hard cast, elbow slung in frayed dirty pouch with strap over neck.)

Eternal rainbird irrigation drops is lassoes on the parched west-front meadow.
Sands in cottage keeping company with Barbara.
In the open front door, dog asleep on doormat.
Out here, the tall, springy stem of a grass-pod bends under the weight of a honeybee.

In the case of bears, a seedy jam. And in the case of coyotes, the hide and hair of small mammals (or I guess larger ones) – because when you’re a coyote you ingest every last shred hoping for some nutrition. It’s why coyote-shit always looks ropy (e.g., on the paved new-development roads, where I run, and in paths of our own woods).

Five in the morning, mid-August: the winter night-sky of 2013 is making its first appearance. To the east above the pines, I spy the unmistakable Pleiades with gladness, and below, Aldebaran, and below that, yes, the belt of Orion, wintertime friend.

(Jupiter 15 degrees around to the northeast.) * * * * August 10, 2013

Consciousness isn’t – isn’t at all – the vaunted “goal” of matter; it isn’t the indispensible center of teleology, or the necessary ingredient in this universe. Consciousness is just a kind of cobweb that got woven in the shrapnel of the galactic explosion as it flies apart.

Transiency (anicca)

Sorrow (dukkha)

Selflessness (anatta)

* * * *

Checked cottage swamp-cooler, climbing on roof.
Ran (half-walked, wearily) the 2-mile course listening to clever J. Simon Bloom’s Berkeley astrophysics.
Reading in St. John of the Cross. And another inch or two thru “The Golden Bowl.”
(Funny: You can skim “Dark Night of the Soul,” of all things. But you can’t skim James.)
Tomato-basil linguini.* * * * August 9, 2013

I’ve insisted (elsewhere, and glibly) that everybody is already in the “saint-and-mystic” category. That would be to say: you’re already a mystic, and you’re already a saint. All without exception, you’re awarded your wings just by virtue of your showing up at all. Which you’ve already done. In such a view, the “saint” and “mystic” categories of experience would be, indeed, like Kantian categories of being. Of course, you don’t think of yourself this way.

But what does it mean to assert such a thing?
For example, is the idea meaningless?
(“meaningless” in the sense of being merely inconsequential, not in the sense of being ill-predicated)

I believe it would mean this: that, by virtue alone of the possession of consciousness in the matrix of matter, you already participate in the radiance that is – stretching a metaphor, here – “the body of Christ.” (Very parochial expression, and not even precisely of my tribe, but a wonderful metaphor, too good to leave alone). Accordingly, simply to “look at” a star, and simply to “experience” it, is to participate in flesh, i.e., to enter into the heart of whatever “divine will” is. These stones have risen up.

Of course all such warmth lies far beneath conscious ratiocination. We have practical thoughts when we look at something like a star, or a tree – i.e., survival-related thoughts, about threats or opportunities – regarding objects of perception. But all the while, the high-voltage miracle everybody is always plugged into is the same as the licensed, reputed mystic’s. As for the reports of visions and ecstasies, the scientist in me has to go to the default “naturalist” explanation that those are hallucinations and physiological phenomena, and maybe chicanery. The closest anybody comes to truly impossible knowledge is, as in Dark Night of the Soul or in “The Cloud of Unknowing,” a rational, hopeful devotion, and a humbling. Not a thunderclap. (Distrusting those thunderclaps!) So the only difference between “you” and the “licensed mystic” – St. John of the Cross, etc. – is aspirational. Announcedly vocational. — In other words, you’re presently having it, having whatever experience is vouchsafed us. You’re just ignoring it. That you ignore it doesn’t take any calories away from the intense blaze you stand within.

Then, as for everybody’s automatic “sainthood,” that’s a question of course morally trickier. How can everybody, without exception, be a saint? If prostitutes and mass murderers and Hitlers and thieves are going to be saints, too, such a notion (such an unhelpful notion!) could only be based on two assumptions:

– that the “problem of evil” is insoluble and incoherent, to mortals, because mortals lack a large-enough syntax. Large enough to, for example, welcome their own personal deaths;
– that “divine will” – (or whatever you call the presumed teleological purposes of the universe, if any) – is inscrutable and unknowable.

Given such a pair of premises, we might all be, already always, working in the service of the teleological Ends of the universe, each enslaved like a saint, head-down, but have no comprehension of how our work is “divine.” Thus therefore, for example, somehow the destroyers of the World Trade Center towers, on that sunny day in September, were doing the lord’s work.
(If you’re a Mormon, simply by joining up, you’re immediately a card-carrying “saint.”) * * * * (False dichotomy in that “naturalism”-vs-“supernatural” distinction: “If anything ‘supernatural’ does turn out to govern nature in any way, well then that would be perfectly natural.”)

* * * *

August 9, 2013

Dose of commercial fertilizer for all fenced-in vegetables
One big 5-gal bucket chicken manure distributed among front apples and pears.

* * * *

August 8, 2013

New pad for evaporative cooler, south side.
Also new float-valve assembly. (No more constant drip!)

* * * *

August 7, 2013

August, the month when I put rainbird sprinklers out and never bring them in. Day and night they’re out there, dropping sparkling loops of the muddy irrigation water.

Insights and feelings that can only come of country living:
Things the hand recoils from:
Recoils from the occasional wasp, reptile, rodent-carcass – in woodpile or in boot-toe – such are common causes of instinctual revulsion. But sometimes, like this morning, a botanical structure causes the automatic disgust: The furry seed-pod of plantain, as on its resilient, insistent stem it poked nuzzling at my knuckle, while I knelt screwing together irrigation connections; and when I became aware of it I jerked my hand away, reflexively (as if a big insect).
In a plant, my nervous system had detected life – life’s structure, life’s tenacity, life’s teleological efficiency, life’s intentionality, an organism’s will and willfulness. Not that I’m mystical about intentionality in plants. But obviously there’s something like a life code which my own nervous system is sensitive to. (More sensitive than is my “higher mind.”)

* * * *

(How I notice, also, that after decades out here, away from the city, my eye is seized and held by the passing bird – and involuntarily keeps following its flight, its dropping and pumping and coasting – all the way up to the pine branch, or roof-gable gutter, or telephone wire. The passing bird matters nowadays: I guess it must be somehow relevant. More than it was in the city. It’s more part of the story of things, apparently, and my eye can’t help but be interested in its diagonal strange pertinence.)

* * * *

Dash is gone: at the county fair. Twenty dollars in pocket. Will meet all friends. He’ll stay till eleven o’clock at night! Under those ghoulish, garish lights. And in the fairground heat all day, toting around his broken arm, in fiberglass cast.

His “County Fair” at age 13 this year. * * * *

* * * *

Chainsaw. Two-stroke oil at SPD.
Mixed fuel: in Mason jar it turns from urine to turquoise.
But no. Can’t take out the blighted apple at the garden fence because the bean plant, next to it, inside the fence, has exceeded the beanpole and woven itself higher and higher, all in among the apple twigs. So most of the tree will stay till fall.

* * * *

August 2, 2013

The thrush is in the woods, near my trailer this morning. The door is open and as I work the trill-tsp-trill keeps making me stop work, mid-sentence, close my eyes: all my own work inside here is nice-enough, but comparatively dull, as long as I can hang my head and listen.

* * * *

Little bout of fond nostalgia, sitting here working, I was reminded of my electric typewriter, the excellent, heavy-as-a-BMW (brand name: “Olympia”). The suave plastic on-off switch. The constant crouching growl of its motor. Then, as I wrote, the gunshot violence of the typefaces banging against the platen. These days, my keyboard is more like a little flat “practice-typing-skills” toy. Its plastic lozenges sink only a millimeter into its face. And I use a track-pad – set on “touch” – so there isn’t even a click of my thumb, there are only touches, double-touches, a finger’s abracadabra stroke. This is all right. But I remember the funny violence of the old electrics, what Gatling-guns they were.

August 1, 2013

Back in Nevada City.

The usual bags and boxes and equipment are spilled off pickup-truck bed, before open bay-doors. Twilight. Alongside this driveway mess, brazier on tripod, flames leap, coals to mellow for cooking tri-tip roast, huge squash harvested late.

Hunter’s farewell dinner. He leaves tomorrow for Georgetown.

His mother today took him down to the Interstate to visit the incredibly glamorous Roseville Galleria mall. (Which, amazingly, nobody from this house has ever visited, in twenty years.) He needed a graduation gift, and the intention was to splurge, on elegant back-too-school clothes, but Hunter found his way to J.C. Penneys. Khaki pants, socks-and-underwear, button-down shirts, blazers.

* * * *

July 23, 2013

Tracy has ordered a Dumpster, in Squaw, for deep (all-the-way-to-the-bottom) basement cleaning, an emotional stage of life. Among the decades’ junk is Galway’s little square of plywood marked “HOME BASE,” from the summer ball games by the lake. He’ll never be out here again, never again leave Vermont, and it goes in the Dumpster. Later, I pull it out and save it.

* * * *

July 22, 2013

The greatness of Henry James.

By a delicacy of POV, he portrays the things people know, which they don’t know they know. That is, unconscious knowledge – often knowledge openly presumed in society while repressed in individuals. The “shadow,” the collaborative evil in society.

Instance, The Golden Bowl’s “pagoda in the garden.”

* * * *

Lying sleepless, night of full moon – Dash in arm-cast sleeping in next room, Brett snoring beside me – I see lucidly that all time is a “waste of time.”

* * * *

July 22, 2013

Stacked cord oak.

Got started again on The Assistant, ironing out risky self-reflective passages.

Dash is laid up with fractured wrist in cast.

* * * *

July 21, 2013

“Equinox” feeling of this over-warm day:

The novel “All Things,” with a click, goes flying to New York with email’s sound-effect of jet fly-by. And a cord of split oak is delivered, to be stacked against house wall for all next winter’s comfort.

* * * *

Janet Fitch, on the deck at Squaw, holding drink, speaking of how hard it is to move her narration on briskly, how her paragraphs grow, dilating on the scene. “I have trouble with moving along to the next thing. ’Cause wherever I am, that’s where I wanna be.”

It’s a motto for life.

On the other hand, the Hasidic proverb is: “While we pursue happiness, we flee from contentment.”

* * * *

A funeral procession in an ashram/zendo/temple place.

The seldom-seen abbot of the place comes out of his hermitage, joining the tail end of procession. He remarks: “Amazing. To see such a long parade of dead bodies, following after a single living person.”

* * * *

July 17, 2013

Henry James (reading The Golden Bowl):

James, surely, overwrites – obviously – But here is what I realize about him: he wasn’t trying, not in the least, to “write well.” (That is, “readably,” “gracefully.”)

What loads his sentences up is pure excitement, reckless excitement. All those heaps of endlessly mixed metaphors and parenthetical qualifiers, they tended to pile up only because it was urgent for him, to get out into the light everything he’d seen and understood. And it’s just a lot. He’d seen plenty. Like much great writing, it isn’t “good writing.”

* * * *

July 16, 2013

Lisa’s friend: she has a full-time job in San Diego, supporting a boyfriend who disapproves of the ethical compromises of complicity in the economy, and sneers at her.

(In general, the phenomenon of a loving woman who supports some kind of character she respects.) (as this scam may be operating in my own household)

* * * *

July 14, 2013

Bear gets into the chickens, in my absence.

* * * *

July 11, 2013

Hectic, hectic. Middle of Fiction Week: sense of Time this week as heavy churning waters, pressing tons against wading. Greeting staff/participant folk, reading the students’ work, music with Greg and Caridwen, personal conferences, workshops. But this morning, eight am, I came out the Annex front door, alone, into the silence of distances, and stood there, and the warmth of midsummer embraced me, weedy dry air of mountain summer, the embrace of death, my constant friend like sunshine, death, and I got back my equilibrium.

* * * *

July 4, 2013

Osvaldo: “Bring me a guitar! I want to sing a song for Barbarita.” Arm lying out along deck railing.

* * * *

Story: A certain “George Whipple” has a chilly life at home: his own pusillanimity; his wife’s manliness. He’s the grocer who, at work, forbids squeezing the Charmin.

* * * *

July 3, 2013

How the time-space basket is woven.

A muon is born in the vacuum above earth atmosphere.

It will naturally decay within a millionth of a second (into photon-neutrino combination). So in a millionth of a second, it can’t travel far. Even traveling at near lightspeed.

BUT, MYSTERIOUSLY, scientists on mountaintops detect muons raining down. How can the thing travel all the way from sky to earth, fifty kilometers, before dying? (It ought to decay within 0.6 kilometers’ journey, even moving at near lightspeed.)

EXPLANATION: Traveling at near lightspeed, it gains from Einsteinian time-slowing: enough time to travel 60 kilometers.

Meanwhile, from the muon’s space-time viewpoint, space-contraction at lightspeed makes the ground closer: when that muon is born, the ground looks 0.5 kilometers away, not fifty kilometers. So it’s an easy half-kilometer hop for that speck.

* * * *

July 2, 2013

“He quit drinking and got clean-and-sober and turned into an asshole.”

* * * *

June 27,

N.C. Alone.

Quiet.

On the Cottage deck. Stars. Past midnight.

Mind wandering all over. Glass of wine. Finished, now, with very satisfactory orchestral reading at Theatre.

Reflecting how almost everybody I know, literally, is getting a Pulitzer these days, but it’s interesting how little, in fact, envy figures into things: The Lord-preserve-me-from-earthly-honors kind of sanity. Because when the work alone is top-drawer, the mind is “like autumn water.” (Nice simile from the Japanese: — phenomenon unfamiliar to anybody who hasn’t spent some seasons noticing the out-of-doors. How streams get in fall.)

Then through the forest, a BANG sound comes. My neighbors the “simple country people” are awake at this hour, and shouting

A man’s voice is raised in anger, or bitterness, also a woman’s. I sharpen my hearing, expecting trouble.

But no, it’s the sounds of fun. Something amusing is happening over there, and it’s just the raillery of friends.

* * * *

June 27, 2013

Nevada City. Hot sunny day, noon, in a café on Broad Street, reading.

A fly alights on the page of the novel I’m reading: the exact same edition of “housefly” as when I was young, fifty years ago in a faraway place. The same six little legs like bent whiskers that can get the surest tickling grip on any surface at any tilt, dirty-looking body, a gleam on the aft section, undersized wings. It’s the same model as in Illinois, 1960. So much else has changed over the decades – now there are computers and smartphones and global-terrorism wars – but the common housefly is the exact same individual, this time walking up the page of Henry James’s “The Golden Bowl,” page 53, the part where Mrs. Assingham and her husband are discussing the intrigues of the Prince.

Lacking a printer, I have to go to an office-supply store, to get new pages printed up. The store is between a fresh-established “Cigarette Town” and a beauty salon advertising “Nails – Pedicure – Extensions – Relaxers – Gift, Bible.”

The text inside: “On June 3, 2013, Charlie Marylebon departed this earth for Wilder Places.” And goes on from there, but I start to feel ghoulish peeking and can’t read on.

* * * *

June 24, 2013

Great change of weather in the mountains, three days of cold rain, high wind. Plastic garbage-bag serves as raincoat. It snaps and rattles in gale, as in dark I climb to upper house. At four am, it’s nice to come up into the upper house and find a dozen blueberry muffins cooling on the stove, two puppies asleep on the pantry floor, here where Tracy is in charge.

* * * *

June 22, 2013

It’s really high summer and hot now. I come out of the clammy basement storeroom where I work, wearing heavy wool tweed and other layers – and at 7:30 in the morning, already the sky is flawless blue, the sun’s radiation on my neck. The jumbled firewood pile at the top of the path in the sun is showing smooth facets of inner pine, of an improbable blinding sheen like platinum (from the perfect violence of their splitting, two years ago). Already, across the canyon, the entire thousand-foot face of rock is lit up flat, as in the old Technicolor Panavision westerns of the MGM studios, at only 7:30.

Poets arrive today.

* * * *

June 20, 2013

The longest day of 2013.

Sandwiches in the office. Each unwraps his own, shares a half.

Late afternoon, everyone arrives from afar in a single hour: Eva, Hunter and Zoey, Andrew-Lisa-Louis.

Very tall, teetering bookshelves, on wheeled dolly, are piloted up the bumpy pavement toward the “Olympic House” quarters of bookshop.

* * * *

June 17, 2013

“The love that moves the Sun and other stars.” (Dante, end of Paradiso)

Stars are also “the army of unalterable law.” (George Meredith)

Got this “app” for my phone called Sky Map: it displays astronomical info, in interactive map of celestial sphere. On its graphic display, the exact center of our so-called “milky” galaxy is marked: They use a tiny dot, a null, a zero-point small as a Kelvin’s “degree” symbol, as location in sky of galaxy-center.

Do they know there’s a massive black hole there? At Milky Way’s center-of-gravity middle, a vortex? With stars chasing around it faster than my coffee grinder? The dark core is a pinhead weighing 4 million suns’ masses. A Dispose-All roars there, and it’s sending everything on, into a physics-free afterlife.

In my phone display, it’s basically just a trivial asterisk.

* * * *

Funny, our galaxy is not only milky; it’s a “way.”

What’s a “way”? For one thing, it’s a path. Or also a tao. The Milky Tao. Or, in Proust’s coinage, a coté. La coté du lait. Or it’s just an old habit, our way. (This is our customary way, and the whole thing is lacteal.)

Who first called it that? It’s sweet, and homey.

* * * *

Cord wood from Amy and Lou, by river. River-bridge’s padlock combo is the same as last year. Lou helps load it on my truck, complaining all the while of Forest Service.

* * * *

June 16, 2013

Squaw Valley.

Dinner: hamburgers, green beans and corn. Just Brett and Dash and I, in Annex, sitting on floor around coffee table.

It’s Father’s Day, and the phone rings. It’s Hunter, wishing me a happy Father’s Day but wanting to move quickly to the topic of where he’s standing right now: on the path along the irrigation ditch above the Nevada City place. The weir is clogged. He is finding the path impassably overgrown with blackberries, it’s getting dark now, Zoey is with him, the mosquitos are coming on thick, and everybody is miserable, so he isn’t going to be able clear the weir. So maybe the place can go without irrigation for a few days? Because he and Zoey leave in the morning on a Death Valley road trip?

* * * *

June 13, 2013

Pleasures of furnishing the conference premises, as it’s an off-season ski resort.

High winds over the ridgetops.

Broken chairs are heaped at one end of a banquet hall.

Empty parking lots, big empty rooms.

These places will feel warmer once we’ve found picture hooks and hung portrait photos of old friends (in summers long ago!) looking dewy and smooth and young and wily.

Solitary trip in Tad’s old pickup, to the storage box in Truckee.

Thin sunshine. No cars on the entire stretch of Highway 89. At this season each day up here is an empty carton.

* * * *

June 9, 2013

Just me and Brett in Squaw.

Watching old Scorcese movie on tv, in a cut eviscerated by editing for commercials.

Scrambled eggs and wine for dinner.

* * * *

June 7, 2013

A period of record-heat days is predicted. Might hit the hundreds.

Up at dark. Cleared blackberries and gorse, at hour when the coolness lets you wear a canvas jacket and pants and gloves.

Hunter and I got the old gasoline-powered tiller down to the end of the driveway, and it’s parked at the roadside.

FREE

Runs well. But note that wheels

are broken at hub

and need replacement.

Experience has shown, in this rural economy almost anything left by the roadside with a “free” sign will disappear fast: a mystery of parsimony that is, in its various depths, both troubling and reassuring.

* * * *

June 4, 2013

Both boys are home, it’s June.

They sleep in late in the mornings, and in general live with the torpor of lions in the shade. Alternate metaphor: alligators basking.

They’ve collaborated on a shopping list of staples whose replenishment has been neglected:

Cheez-its

Corn Chips

Frozen berries

meat

tuna

Granulated sugar

* * * *

June 4, 2013

Little comedies of this life.

Ten in the morning, I try to go out and sit alone, to think seriously about the direction this “Assistant” book is taking. I go sit where I’ve for some reason never sat, on the comfortable little flat boulder beside the grinding rock. I’m sure that Maidu Indian women and girls sat here – and sat here over generations, centuries ago, gossiping and laughing it up and working – because the grinding rock has a dozen deep mortars worn into it, where women ground acorns into mash using water from the creek below. Deep-as-bird’s-nests depressions in granite. That’s a lot of mortar-and-pestle work. Somehow a grinding rock seems a fitting place for soul-searching (self-consciously). But the mosquitos in the shade are too menacing, so in about one minute, I stand up and move.

To sit where. The nearest place (in the sun, and mosquito-free) is the plywood altar where chickens are beheaded. Complete with metal collar to hold neck in place, little chalk turd where chicken accomplished its mortal bowel movement, nail to fasten leash and stretch neck, gash where axe-blade bashed through wood-laminations.

Choosing a place to sit isn’t going to help an unwritable book.

* * * *

Egg carton contains a few hens’ eggs of mostly uniform color and grade – and at one end, rattling around in its cardboard cup, a quail egg, big as a marble and speckled. About which, in our kitchen over the week, there’s been a lot of dithering.

* * * *

June 3, 2013

Wakeful at 2 in the morning. No confidence in the novel “Assistant” as it stands.

No confidence, furthermore, in the idea of readership anymore. Readership of any sort.

One had always thought the best writing was more than flimflam and baloney. But it begins to seem that writing which is anything else than flimflam is not artistic. Anything other than flimflam is boring and unwanted.

So here (age 59), at this far reach of this long road, I’ve come to think an amateur incompetence suffuses the truly best work. As does practical unsuccess crown “the best work.” I don’t like my novel; it’s not a likeable novel; I guess I didn’t mean it to be; and I think maybe I don’t want to write a “likeable” novel. Well, I’ve succeeded.

Get up, go downstairs, two-in-the-morning; pad around in socks; tick-tock the kitchen clock; not tempted by the high shelf of booze-bottles (I’ve been lucky that way, in my life); crumbs of salad preparation underfoot; magazines in the bathroom; this is the hydrate-and-urinate hour of the night.

In the sky, Orion at this season has been absent for some while, on extended vacation. In the south Scorpio (red Antares at its center) is already diving into the trees! I’d seen it just three hours earlier, and it was only just coming up, only just a bit to the left.

I realize that those southern constellations are swinging around a pole that is just below the horizon. It’s a globe out there, which we’re inside of, not a flat map dragged past. If I point at the north celestial pole (Polaris) and raise my other arm oppositely 180 degrees, to point at the south celestial pole, it’s clear that Scorpio has a very-near hub it’s swinging around.

Time to go inside. Underfoot, in the porch-lamplight, a spider blunders over the old sidewalk, headed for the garden: he’s been out here roaming and trekking in the dark without my spectatorship, and when I go back inside and turn out the porch lamp, he’ll be in darkness again. (Could a spider be oblivious to the light/dark distinction?) I assume he has some routine reason for being out tonight. It’s not insomnia with him.

Anyway, I go back in, and this series of reflections seems to have worked to make me feel I could sleep again in some faith.

Stars, spiders, none of this is “divinity” (that preposterous idea) or “evidence of” divinity, but it’s immanent, and immanence is as close as we get. Somehow in this light, I have to be willing to presume even my benighted novel has some reason.

* * * *

June 3, 2013

At 9:20 am: Far away under the potting-shed overhang, the old steel gas can emits its loud clear bonk sitting on the straw bale (just where it sat all last summer) in the grip of direct sun. As the summer goes along I suppose that bonk resonates, each day, one and a half minutes earlier than the day before. Then, with August, will subside, and delay, day by day tolling the hour later and later.

* * * *

June 2, 2013

Trip to Squaw.

* * * *

May 31, 2013

Today I saw Mary (from up the road where it used to be unpaved) — But now she’s being pushed in a wheelchair!

She’s in her nineties. For years since her husband died, she was to be seen walking alone every afternoon, burdened by the shadow of a vast hatbrim. Then in recent months with two canes.

Today some kind of attendant or nurse was pushing her. It wasn’t her daughter-in-law.

Mary who walked from Selma to Montgomery. Famously, because she was the darling of the photo-essay (Smithsonian magazine). (The photogenic white gal out in front!) Now Mary may have taken her last walk.

I drove by slow. Waved cheerily. She waved cheerily from moving chair.

* * * *

But the thing I admire almost as much, about Mary:

In Berkeley in 1964 she got her kids making candles in the basement. Neighbor kids, too. There was somehow a little colony of Quaker families on a Berkeley hillside neighborhood. Then she sent her son Paul, with brother, out to set up a cardtable at the head of Telegraph Avenue, and sell homemade candles! It was, in 1964, the only card-table w/merchandise on the entire street. Way anticipating the counterculture’s miniaturized, intimate scale of commerce, predicating so many new ideas about relationship with ecosystem and society.. (And WAY before that Telegraph scene deteriorated into the mendicant and artisanal souk of later times, and at last the regrettable panhandling low-point.)

Sent the kids down to town with card-table, tablecloth. Beeswax candles, right there in front of Sather gate. Birth of a movement. Pioneer.

Some people just make things possible. It is of course lost to history who they were. The actual inventor/pioneer is not only unsung, she is to be positively repressed and erased. Only the secondary imitator is licensed to be credited with innovation. A new idea doesn’t fit any imprint, not until a first violation has been established.

Of that little instance of Mary’s actual trailblazing, the only commemoration will be here on a (virtual, pixil-made) page, in my daily ephemeris in a well-folded-away wrinkle in the internet.

* * * *

May 28, 2013

At Sands’s for hamburgers. Luke and Maggie are there.

Luke has spent a year making a tenor guitar out of wood he has been acquiring over the years.

He’s a master, and it’s a great guitar. Beauty plus lasting utility. Plus the mysterious soul that’s in it. That’s a charisma Luke has: putting something beautiful in the world.

* * * *

May 25, 2013

Hunter and I prepare soil.

Brett does the planting and installs drip irrigation.

While we work, radio show “This American Life” is broadcast over garden from truck dashboard radio.

Tomato

Cucumber

Zucchini

Yellow crookneck

Anaheim pepper

Blue Lake bean

* * * *

May 23, 2013

Still keeping starts indoors, for fear of frost.

* * * *

May 20, 2013

Back from Boston, bringing on the same plane Hunter, who is now an educated man.

Eight heavy, large suitcases stacked on airport redcap’s wheeled cart. (The high-wide-handsomeness of a certain stage of life.)

Tonight, chili w/ canario beans from the I-80 exit at Pedrick Rd. And salad of the bolted arugula. Arugula, even when bolted and leggy, is still delicious, stems and all.

In our absence, two entire rows of cauliflower were eaten by some big rodent, who has now discovered us. Possible even deer, if gate were left open.

(Had a chance to see J.S. Sargent’s “Nocturne” in Boston, a dim painting in a dim room, still a great experience. Also a big Rembrandt self-portrait at about age 23, a painting of a jaunty, callow young man, executed in a style – jaunty, callow – of show-offy technical virtuosity.)

(What I told a student once: “Well, ‘talent‘ — talent is just the red herring dragged across your path, to distract/confuse you.”)

* * * *

May 13, 2013

Must fly to Boston tomorrow. Hunter’s graduation. Six am flight. I shouldn’t feel so out-of-practice, but I’m going to hate modern luxury air travel, the thunderous wasteful world thereof. Mining and refining the jet fuel – how many foot-pounds of energy? – to lift two hundred overweight Americans and carry them two thousand miles easily, how much damage to soil and air, and to the polity.

In affluent society, practicing a little simplification seems (is!) an affectation rather than any consequential deed, no matter how I cut and cut and cut. Typical American consumers’ caprice of a moment causes (does cause, every day) lifetimes of misery, for Nigerian Ogoni, Iraqis, Bangladeshi, etc. And somebody’s lifetime is a lifetime – in the sense of binding infinite space in a nutshell. It just doesn’t happen to be “my” lifetime.

What if there never was any “self” to discard, not here, nor anywhere? What if we’re all – (all of us, from president to postman, from “I.Q. 50” to “I.Q. 150”) – all already in a state of kenosis, and abject submission to God’s will? (The view that we’re “already in heaven ghostly.”)

Today I fixed gutters on cottage, worked on someone else’s novel happily for money, futzed in vain with leak in swamp cooler of Big House, bicycled to town and back on errand,, moved woodpile by cottage, applied second coat of Varathane to wooden toilet-tank lid. So, what was that all about?

* * * *

May 12, 2013

“Innocence” continues to get little attention or reviews. I think it’s a book that will do poorly in the marketplace. The thing seems “innocent” (or even “romantic” on the cover) (and after all, it is about love). But the hard-to-discern secret of the thing is that it’s a dark book, in its concerns, in the gruesomeness of its metaphors. It’s almost a cold-hearted book (my fussy minster notwithstanding). The sharpest online reader-review of “Innocence,” in my mind, is on a site called “Goodreads,” where a lady has written something like, “This is an awful book, I hated it.” I love her for feeling that. She’s a real reader, and she’s right, it’s not a nice book. (It’s also a great book, but she’s right.)

Further thoughts, May 12:

What’s difficult about “Innocence” – i.e., what makes not-so-pleasant reading – is that it’s about love but it’s the real thing. “Love” is something that literature and song usually frame as pretty nice, pretty cute, pretty fun, pretty desirable. But love in reality (this thing we’re part of) is way more complicated. Moreover, it’s a big warm glacier, in the sense that it’s “Divine” – (or “teleological,” take your pick, whatever notion scares you least) – and the word “monstrous” applies to love’s transformations. Anybody who has ever come anywhere near loving knows: The fun-dreamy-cute-wonderful descriptions in Song and Story cease to apply right away, replaced by grief foretold, anguish even in the best. Real love is a project we’re part of.

More: The book also about sin, (per se, remoteness from God). And that notion “sin” has been so hermetically enshrined in Catholicism, the morally unsophisticated unreflective pop-folk of our time say freely and easily, “What is this ‘sin’ nonsense? I haven’t ‘sinned.’”

I contemplate that photo and I can’t help but think (the organism’s mind is such a tirelessly adaptive organ!): “Could broccoli grow there? How could that soil be amended? With lime and bone ash and standard fertilizers, in Martian atmosphere (carbon dioxide, argon, oxygen). And under the glass panes of a cold-frame?”

Well, it’s of course hopeless. Soil is as complicated as flesh, rich with spores and bacteria and fungus and rhizomes, all urbanely communicating, all a society that evolved underfoot over billions of years. But it’s sweet to think we could contaminate Mars so easily.

* * * *

May 7, 2013

In the cottage office, Brett is sitting with feet up on desk, looking disconsolate.

“I just sent out twenty acceptance emails for fiction. And not one response yet.”

“What response are you expecting?”

“You know, ‘Whoo-Hoo!’”

“How long ago did you send them?”

“About five minutes.”

It’s ten o’clock in the evening. In some of the time zones where acceptances arrive, it’s deep night.

* * * *

May 6, 2013

A little rain finally. Light but steady, all day. It should continue all week. Snow on the summit.

Pears look to be abundant this year, marble-sized red hard fruit studs the branches. (This perhaps as direct result of manure-to-dripline application).

Outside in the drizzle, on the forest floor behind my trailer:

– the old chrome guitar stand (missing its U-bar for cradling the neck);

– ancient broom, its straw bristles ground to a hard heel, but still useful;

– coffee table, which a falling oak-branch stabbed through last year.

In the distance, thru the woods I hear my neighbor’s rhythmic Rainbird sprinkler – tap tap tap tap tap – throwing loops of water out, in a circle in his pasture in the rain. It’s been doing that for days now.

* * * *

May 5, 2013

Sunday

Awake at 2:30.

The Nevada section of “The Assistant.”

Heading back up for coffee, still before dawn, that one crazy exuberant bird in the fir tree (I’m guessing robin or grosbeak) wildly, bravely yodeling in the dark, awake before all others.

(church interlude)

long nap

tennis at public courts (where, while playing, I fret over my cold-hearted novel, out there on bookstands making enemies)

Dash and Brett go to a movie, while I stay home and accomplish Squaw business.

Long ‘phone conversation with Hunter, who is done with college this week and makes me proud. In two weeks, Brett and I fly to Boston for graduation ceremony.

Roast chicken.

* * * *

May 5, 2013

Yet another hike to the weir. (Pressure drop in irrigation.) An easy clog.

Disassembled the entire mechanical floor of dishwasher, looking for jam. My array of Allen wrenches spilling over the open door. The culprit: broken glass in the food-chopper.

(The Internet – as a resource – came along just in time for me to acquire the skills of country living off-the-grid. I would never have had the fortitude – to kneel on kitchen floor, bravely dismantle a dishwasher. Or on ladder, a swamp cooler. Or, lying on meadow, a mower deck. Online are discussion groups among men just like me bamboozled by something mechanical. As I was raised, I missed out on the filial apprenticeship to the manly practical arts, car-maintenance, power tools, etc. Through Google, I can fake it.) (And access to all libraries, instant info, so I don’t miss the city quite so badly.)

(The thing one misses about the city isn’t just the specific museum or gallery or concert – (tho’ there’s all that). When you cross the Golden Gate Bridge and plunge in, the heart of the city is love, intense love, the glamor of love, love everywhere in all those crowds and sidewalks: not exactly promiscuity – (tho’ there’s that) – but rather a mutual admiration and a mutual respect and an intensified, multiplied agape, the necessarily narcissistic experience of the mirror-image everywhere, when entering the flow, on a nice evening taking oneself out for a little spin around the block. None of that happens in the country.)

But if you say, ‘This is good,’ He replies, ‘You think that’s good? I’ll show you good.’”

* * * *

May 3, 2013

A certain poet now has written a long essay, about his own late-in-life conversion to a belief in “God.” His sudden attack of thoughtfulness was occasioned by his diagnosis with cancer.

I don’t know the man’s poetry at all, unfortunately, and I don’t mean to judge him ad hominem. (I haven’t even read the book (!), just the reviews (!!), and I don’t even know what description of “God” he has settled on believing in; and maybe his thinking is all much more nuanced than I’m assuming). It doesn’t bother me that the “mortality” alarm was what made him start looking around. But he must have been, all along, a mighty poorpoet if he’s been so superficial — superficial as never to have realized that he always was terminal, terminal from the start. Isn’t that one of the first reflections of us all? And the basis of our relationship with reality? The beginning of all rudimentary philosophy and lit? (I mean, for an eminent, well-published poet. . . . ?)

* * * *

May 1, 2013

Reading Faulkner. A tonic for the disillusioned or lazy fiction writer. It’s possible to forget how good good can be.

* * * *

April 30, 2013

My friend the minister, on false humility: “You have to distrust a bishop who only wears the black. And goes around like that. If you’re a bishop, you have to wear the purple.”

* * * *

April 27, 2013

Driving down to SF, just me and Brett, Brett the luckiest ingredient in the whole world, we’re shopping for the party, all across Calif:

My own book’s notion is very much congruent with his: that a revolution among the innocent, in heaven, might pull down a God who was always malignant, and even exact punishment from that God.

But I add one important thing: that is what Judeo-Christianity already did. It’s what the whole drama of Christianity is, God’s answering for his maliignance, and it happens every sunday morning in small towns everywhere (a weekly ceremony whose metaphor would be repugnant to its devotees if they ever considered what they were doing): that messianic revolution is already a fait accompli.

* * * *

April 21, 2013

On television are endless reconsiderations of bloody mayhem in Boston-marathon, the innocents on the sidewalk in their gore, while here, on the carpet the dog naps, curled-up. Brett is applying postage stamps to envelopes that are stacked spilling on couch cushions beside her. She finishes, and shoves it away, proud of her work: “That’s rejections for eighty-five poets.”

* * * *

April 20, 2013

Saturday.

Tennis – just “hitting” for an hour.

Mowing west meadow.

Storm windows come off second story.

* * * *

April 19, 2013

Diatomaceous earth in chicken feed: 5%

* * * *

April 17, 2013

Trying not to go back to work on “All Things.” (The futility of it), I distract myself with spring chores. (Mowing meadows, finally burying the exposed west septic tank, hauling brush to road, etc. The place is a mess.)

Then today, in a coffee shop on Broad Street, I’m waiting for my cappuccino and the baristo (twenty-something, a glowering “barbarian intellectual” with inky tattoos and disfiguring earrings like Queequeg, plus horn-rimmed glasses) brightens up and points at the paperback I’m carrying:

The upshot is, echoes from the world do seem to matter. “Despair,” well, despair is “S.O.C.” (Standard Operating Conditions). But to a little affirmation there’s a practical, efficient benefit. I actually feel a bit like getting back to work, on account of some evidence of care. There are particular readers out there (not just the ones evident in the media machine), and I have a new friend.

* * * *

April 15, 2013

Billy Sheatsley drops off a beautiful sliding-bin cabinet for garbage, in Macondray Lane kitchen to replace the old trash compactor.

After which: dinner at Matteo’s Public. (Barbara is happy, not so deeply melancholy as usual, walks an entire block to the parked car, at a good brisk clip, and she gets in the car at end of evening, letting herself be buckled into her seatbelt, saying, “Thank you, that was a good dinner. I’ve always loved North Beach.”)

* * * *

April 13, 2013

Saturday, first light. Outside my trailer window, the white molded-plastic chair in the gloom is deep sherbet blue in the charcoal of the woods.

To overcome Nagel’s notion that the evolution of consciousness is so improbable and mystic:

IF, in Big-Bang cosmology, an INFINITE number of possible universes will INEVITABLY have instanced, then there will, unavoidably, be one where “consciousness” evolves. (presuming the words “infinite” and “inevitable” have meaning)

It contains groceries, donated to a certain Mario, one of the Broad Street homeless chorus in front of Bonanza Market, then passed on to Cavendish, as Mario lacked the wit to cook or use most of it. Now it comes to our kitchen.

Bag tiny marshmallows.

Bag regular-size marshmallows.

Canned yams.

Canned mixed vegetables, diced.

Raspberry Jello mix.

Another bag of marshmallows.

“Rainbo” dinner rolls, 16 little pillows joined in a thick quilt.

Campbell’s tomato soup concentrate.

Pet treats.

(Cavendish departs after dinner with vacuum cleaner and attachment, to clean under stage riser, so that the actors who crawl there in costume during the production won’t sneeze.)

* * * *

March 30, 2013

Weather holds in northwesterly flow. Won’t precipitate. Precipitation further north along Sierra crest.

Immense victory, here:: irrigation is unclogged. To see the gush makes me feel I can breathe again. I hear its gurgling bloop bloop. In the night, while we all sleep, it’ll be going bloop bloop in its little hole by the roadside.

I’m in the city this week bedazzled by Bay Bridge, Vermeer show, the guitars in the Van Ness showroom, the traffic, the pranks of artists in SFMOMA – but still every day, I bring up my sky map apps and planetarium website. Which continues to be a high point in the day. The appearance of Antares in the night sky matters even more than Vermeer – and Antares matters even when I can’t see it (for fog, light-pollution, tall buildings).

The ample high-ceilinged spaces mean Man Is the Measure of All Things, and granted even unto me, at my lowliest, all entitlement and all dignity.

* * * *

March 23, 2013

Sunny.

A Saturday spent in the accomplishment of nagging chores.

Finish half-done pruning (because branches and wands lie all over the meadow).

Washing machine to be re-leveled, on larger, flat plywood base.

The outlet valve of irrigation system continues to gush water into the ravine, day and night, because I can’t fix the clog uphill. I have actually tried Drano (having isolated all run-off), thinking maybe organic-matter plugs will dissolve.

The one wicked hen – a coppery Wyandotte – menaces all other hens, pecks out their feathers, is unreformed by solitary confinement, and will probably have to go to heaven.

Hunter continues to hear nothing from grad schools.

Novel and music project, both, hang in incompleteness.

Have to go to SF tomorrow. During my absence, will leave outlet valve gushing into ravine.

There’s a narrow wrought-iron chair out in the meadow under moonlight. That’s where I sat alone, a couple of nights ago after all had gone to bed, happy as I could possibly be. My iPhone’s new “Star Map” application was confirming all my favorites – Aldebaran, Rigel, Betelguese, Sirius – then Arcturus, Antares, Vega, on around to Polaris – all shining in the tiny window that glows with a special night-vision amber warmth, glass of wine beside me on the rung of the pruning ladder.

* * * *

March 22, 2013

Clog in long irrigation line again. Same area as before, 4 yrs ago.

But this time the firehouse declines to help with their high-pressure hoses.

* * * *

March 21, 2013

Overcast warm night.

Three am, four am, five am, six am: Visiting stallion in the barn down the road keeps kicking at his stall. Audible from this distance.

* * * *

March 20, 2013

Familiar Northern-Calif “flavor sensation”:

raindrops in coffee, and raindrops on rim of mug.

Quiet, warm day of steady, light rain, in straight perpendicular verticals from papery sky to earth. No wind at all. Silent rain. Stuck inside a haiku all day. I work all day in trailer.

Dash is home from school with stomach complaint.

* * * *

March 19, 2013

Money worries. Sleepless night.

Then, a day of offstage noise as big yellow machines (Caterpillar and Vermeer) are laying fiber-optic cable in a trench along our road.

* * * *

March 17, 2013

Sunday. Pruning of apples and pears. (Also fruitless mulberry.) Wheelbarrow heaped with last year’s chicken manure: shovelfuls on all pears and apples to drip-line.

Discover George’s old dormant sprays in potting shed, in bottles of coke-brown glass. Which this year I’ll apply to sick apple tree. One of them looks harmless, called “49er,” with lime and some kind of natural oil.

* * * *

March 16, 2013

Osvaldo picks up guitar. Lunch at Lefty’s. Eddy’s new book.

Watch televised tennis back here in the cottage.

* * * *

March 14, 2013

The international physics community announced today that, after a year of scrupulous calculation-checking, they think they can safely say the explanation of “mass” (Higgs field) has been detected, and confirmed as predicted.

Their triumph includes some disappointment for them: it implies they’ve come to “the end of physics.” It implies the standard model will go on unchallenged. They would almost rather have had negative results, and so be goaded to further mysteries/investigations.

Well, I’m not worried about the “End of Physics.” Such recurring millenarianism is always going to be shattered, come Monday morning.

However: What Does This Say About the Cognizability of the Universe?

This finding – (if it IS a “finding”) – represents the absolute weirdest correspondence so far, between manmade concepts (the “grammatical sentences” we’ve built here on warm wet earth), and the great order/logos that we propose must have been glimmering eternally out there. Well, apparently it really is glimmering out there.

* * * *

But yesterday, too, was a great day in history.

Trip to the county dump:

You back up your truck, and you push your undesirables over a small cliff (descent of about 8 ft.), where a bulldozer pushes things to left and to right.

I’m sweeping out my pick-up bed, and meanwhile the beautiful young urban-hipster couple next to me, with their own pick-up, is hurling big tin cans of food over the brink. Dozens of cans. By the apparent heft, they’re full, perfectly good, unopened. Half-gallon-size cans, with uniform paper labels. Corn, tomatoes, beans, etc. I ask why.

The cute girl says, with a laugh (they’re obviously starting their lives together in a new place), “It’s ‘End-of-the-World’ food from 1980.”

Some old guy in 1980 furnished his underground bunker with this. Looks like a kit he bought: (“$1499.99 for, the Deluxe Survivor’s Package.”)

In 1980, when that investment was made, where was this girl? She hadn’t been born yet. She was nowhere. There was absolutely no glimmer of her. Nor suspicion, nor expectation. Of her! The one who came! Such a beauty! The messiah to throw it all away!

* * * *

March 12, 2013

Home again from the road. Where is everybody. Brett’s car is here. So is Billy Sheatsley’s truck.

Barbara is being entertained by courtly tall Billy, in the cottage. I’m all stiff from the hours on the Interstate. The pullets are in the meadow, still in their pied a terre. The two identical-twin cats are in the mud room, but with no itch to escape into the night, because they’ve found a cricket now. The poor springtime bug is inching groggily (still half-dormant) over the square stones of the mud room floor, and the two felines watch it, pat at it, watch it some more, pat at it. Taking turns patting at it. Dash is to be found in the kitchen tearing a leaf of lettuce off the refrigerated head, dribbling drops on it from a tilted bottle of commercial “Goddess” dressing, poking it into his mouth, then repeating procedure.

* * * *

March 12, 2013

It’s been a day of remembering the goners.

Oakley, 4 yrs ago, had had a doctor’s appointment (to discuss prognosis and treatment options), wherein he was told, “You’re at a crossroads. You can leave this earth via cancer or via kidney failure. Kidney failure is much to be preferred.” Then, a half-hour after that appointment, he and Barbara and Brett and I are in Auburn together acting as if we were thinking of buying a pre-fab cottage for O and B to spend their golden years in. “Touring models” is what we were doing.

I remember the salesman was yammering on – addressing himself to Barbara. Because Barbara was always the money – but now she’d had a stroke, and maybe she was still the money, but she was no longer the smart money – and Oakley post-doctor-visit sat to one side, on a high barstool, not listening, sagging to one side, one foot on the floor.

One of his standard jokes over the years was (on the topic of “irony” and its overuse and abuse): “Well, in the end, when you’re facing the firing squad, what have you got left but irony.”

It was funny at the time. It was funny on sunny summer afternoons. Now there he was under the fluorescent lights of the sales-office sitting on a tall stool, deserted by irony.

Then the next day, I was in Mill Valley, at The Depot in my ghostly way, I got a BLT and sat alone at the table where Don Carpenter used to sit (him with his cup of highly-dilute milky weak tea, after a morning’s writing, scrawny bantam rooster, folding his arms high, scratching his cheeks through his beard), in the great quiet days when The Depot wasn’t so glam. I remembered his cynical sniper’s eye for the meaner interpretation, the absolutely uncalled-for vengeful violence in his novels, what a sucker he was for the movie biz, because all real lovers are hopeless suckers: and the generosity, the weakness of the body and the ferocity of the spirit.

You can’t bring anybody back, or turn back the clock, simply by sitting at the same old table. It’s remarkable that the table is still there, though. Round wood top, hasn’t been refinished. Morning sun still hits it, just as always.

* * * *

March 10, 2013

More pruning. Lots of sunshine.

Today: tax preparation; invitation-list for book party; the art-book intro must fly away to Chicago in final version; maybe try to figure out how to repair my inaccurate “Wikipedia” entry.

Dash will need help on science-fair project (feeding subjects SweetTart candies, to prove people don’t know what their taste buds are telling them.)

I tend to be more forgiving of publishers’ yawing thru choppy waters, squalls. The good things happen thru inattention just as often as the deplorable/regrettable things happen thru careful management.

It’s just me and Brett tonight. Prawns for dinner.

* * * *.

March 7, 2013

Rain. Can’t prune.

* * * *

March 2, 2013

Finished now, with more personal draft of The Assistant. Will let it sit for a while.

* * * *

March 1, 2013

Today the Catholic Church in Rome is temporarily decapitated of its Pope, the federal gov’t’s new “austerity” measures have automatically stopped funding basic services, and I’ve installed hand railings all through Barb’s cottage so she’ll have some support as she totters around.

(She’s back from rehab yesterday.)

* * * *

Where the memory goes naturally and discovers sadness:

Crossing big weedy parking lot in St. Louis, noonday, alone.

Riding the el in Chicago, late nights, no place to go.

Sleeping on garage floor in Fairfax.

I-93 through Wisconsin, and Waukegan train station, empty, 1975.

Rockaway Parkway, Brooklyn, mid-morning, thin sunshine.

Better memories to actively rehearse:

Walking all the way up Broadway from Soho to see editor, wearing white bucks.

Breakfast outside on gravel. Hacky-sack stuck in bole of tree. Kooky British girls cruise up in rent-a-car.

I pull up in Squaw after driving the length of California in VW squareback.

Getting off work after night shift, Tamalpais: parking lot, glimmer of San Francisco.

Walking around the block in SoHo in escape from party: a stranger in the night hands me a long-stemmed rose.

* * * *

February 24, 2013

Broccoli to harvest April 20

Chard to harvest April 25

* * * *

Nagel is incredulous that biological complexity and consciousness could have evolved from cold matter. But such skeptics underestimate the amount of sheer time at evolution’s disposal:

Time is infinitely roomy in two dimensions: in the extended-duration dimension there are aeons to waste, bazillions of aeons; and in the inward-divisibility dimension, there are nano- and pico-seconds to subdivide, and further subdivide infinitely. In both directions, that’s more than enough playtime for, well, for everything conceivable to happen!

We just happen to be very slow-to-think creatures on a quantum timescale, and on the astronomic timescale we’re very quick-to-pop creatures.

* * * *

February 23, 2013

Saturday. Royce scholar at E. Tome’s bookstore.

Weiss Bros.: broccoli, chard, parsley.

Susoyev is in town and Sands brings him for dinner: pork roast w/crust of fennel-rosemary-garlic-sage-salt-pepper.

has come bearing dollop of goat-cheese from up on Cement Hill somewhere.

* * * *

February 21, 2013

Sunshine. Snowmelt. Ten AM.

On the clothesline, a dozen multicolored pennants of Brett’s underwear above snow field.

Hike up the hill, find and fix the usual clog in irrigation. An acorn cap in the intake.

Traveling by an unaccustomed route through the forest: in clearing is an old fallen-all-over stack of wooden drawers, their joints dovetailed, old, once painted. I’d come across this clearing before, and noticed these. This time I realize what they are, they were once apiaries. They’re so rotten the dovetail joinery is warping, separating in jack-o’-lantern grins.

Tues. AM, 10:00 – Brett’s black Toyota does three-point turn in driveway, and she heads out onto the road, errands of mercy. Snowflakes big-as-moths are coming down. I check, and in potting shed we’ve got plenty of gasoline for generator. A foot or two is expected today. (Which at this elevation is enough to stop travel.)

Today is the day Barbara is to be evacuated from far-off rehab, to move into closer-at-hand rehab. Then soon home.

Meanwhile, Kait phoned this AM. Her aged mom drove over summit yesterday to visit Barbara but, passing thru our neighborhood, felt a heart pain and checked herself into the local emergency room. Spent the night in hosp. Now we’ll have Joan here, too, tonight and indefinitely, recuperating. Must take custody of her at hosp “discharge.” The two old girlfriends – post-stroke, post-heart-attack – together in the cottage. It’s a good thing I got for the expensive generator.

Emergency call from school: All parents, come get your kids right now, immediately, because the roads are becoming impassable. (So, Brett is to do this.)

Next emergency call from school: All parents, stay home, don’t come for your kids, the roads ARE impassable.

Next, text-message from Brett: she’s at the foot of the slope to our elevation, and I should “wish her luck.”

I greet her standing in stocking feet under porch roof on cement, spooning soup up from long-handled pot into mouth.

* * * *

February 18, 2013

Sunday night. Barb still in rehab, it’s only us 3 for dinner.

So it’s a one-candle table. But the repast is roast beef, Brussels sprouts, purple carrots, red wine. Dashiell then practices his Tarrega guitar piece for at least half an hour at the table.

Later, 4am, coyote across the road uphill.

* * * *

February 17, 2013

Running, with iPod in pocket, listening to U.C. Berkeley lecture on earbuds.

Then, with a transitional blip, the LOUD voice of Alan Watts comes into my earbuds:

“You are a fluke!”

* * * *

Passing notion in airport:

Certain things are considered bedrock realities, while their evidence comes via perceptions universally acknowledged to be illusions:

Matter is in fact“string-like vibrations” ineffable to human conception, combined with the human observation or measurement.

“Color” and “light” are in reality wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.

“Warmth” is the crowding of constituent molecules and atoms.

“Gravitation” – immediately palpable as pressure of the sole against the sidewalk – has never yet been satisfactorily pictured. Another comfy force beyond our conception, it has been subjugated only to geometric metaphorsof space-distortion and mathematical formula.

Time and space, of course, belong in this list.

So “human perception” is a very peculiar, idiopathic apprehension of modalities of the Real.

* * * *

February 17, 2013

Barbara will get off light: recovering all her capacities. Will even be improved by this (as it’s being called) transient ischemic shock.

Last night, just at the daily hour of the wineglass and the television news, a new vertical crease delves in her right cheek, she complains she’s fine, slurring, while lifting her tired arms for her daughters to dress her for the emergency-room trip.

This morning in the sun, her wheeled walker in driveway. In its pannier pouch is her usual loot – a few silver spoons, an out-of-date “Arts and Entertainment” section stuffed down deep, hairbrush, two of the Irish lace napkins – she always likes to have a little portable wealth with her in case of hasty departures. But left it behind.

* * * *

February 10, 2013

I’ve said below:

“Attaching the name god to a cosmic First Cause doesn’t change a thing, doesn’t illuminate, let alone improve, an irredeemability that is in the world.”

But there are two soft spots there:

Who says “redeemability” is a reasonable or desirable expectation? Are we warranted in wanting to think of ourselves as, like, coins to be bounced? Or “redemption” a coherent, discussable notion?

The name god indeed changes nothing. Yes indeed. The irrefragable fact of givenness remains as an electrifying affirmation.

(spake voice in whirlwind)

* * * *

February 10, 2013

Nico and Aleksandra displace Cavendish in the playroom bed, and Nico observes the place is a hostel.

Sands’s prawns in Arborio rice, and the NC Cabernet Franc.

* * * *

February 10, 2013

Saturday. Six new pullets. (from Rough and Ready)

* * * *

February 8, 2013

Cavendish is still living in the playroom – it’s been a month now, and here’s the difficulty: the work he must do, of repairing the bear damage to his woodland-clearing home, will be really dreary and lonely and cold. The bear bent and ripped the trailer’s metal door and, during his tenancy, raked all the contents around, and out onto the ground. Cavendish had left the place unvisited for at least a month. That he is feeling daunted is understandable, but here’s the difficulty: I’m reminded of Paul Radin in Squaw Valley, whose surrender of his cabin to the intruding bear was a first sign of his giving up. Began camping on the open ground before the cabin that now belonged to the bear, library and all. When you cede your own square yard of intimate inalienable territory – (this is true of urban homo sapiens, too, on the city sidewalk) – you’ve ceded a dignity that’s part of health.

Paul, famous “Jewish Indian” of Highway 89 carrying his Haggadah and his deerskin medicine-pouch at his throat, began sleeping outside his cabin even in winter, employing a crazy system of propane space heaters outdoors. He would hitchhike to town every few days carrying two five-gallon propane tanks for refill. When we used to bring him marijuana for ease of cancer, we’d find him sitting up like a swami, on the mound of his beloved dead horse Zumgali, between the hot cymbals of two propane heaters’ radiant pans.

So today was the day Cavendish was supposed to move out of the playroom. Leaving behind his French roast coffee, his Spam, his ciabbatta loaf. And work on his place. Make a home.

But no. “Midsummer Night’s Dream” is going up in two weeks, and some other play about the origins Buddhism, opening in March, is going to present tremendous technical complications involving scrims and lights and scarves and flats – so he has gone to live in a rumored spare room at a lower elevation in Alta Sierra, so the upshot is, we merely feel dastardly in encouraging him to leave.

* * * *

February 8, 2013

Slushy snow. Wet firewood is stacked around the mudroom stove to dry. Clam pasta. The days are beginning to get longer now, and I think with almost disbelief of the summer to come, when in the higher mountains, all the doors will be propped open all afternoon, and pans for dinner will be clanking at a time when the sun is still high in the sky.

The news on NPR is of the robotic vehicle exploring Mars, named “Curiosity.” It has found a suitable rock to start rapping on and drilling into, pulverizing. It’s about a foot and a half wide, flat, sandstone. Evidence that there was once liquid water. Some sand it scooped up had been blown by wind. Wind! (A habitable planet, that one-in-a-trillion unlikelihood, seems to have almost popped up, and right next door to our planet.)

Here, after sunrise, as cold front approaches with rain front, first gusts make the hawthorn twigs tremble, the cedar fronds nod, then stillness again, then the first drops start falling.

Will turn to snow later today. Whenever rain, as predicted, arrives, it’s always gladdening because it seems to indicate that everything isn’t broken!

* * * *

February 5, 2013

Cavendish downstairs in playroom is up all night, lots of pacing downstairs, going out for a cigarette.

I was wakeful, too, had a worried, dyspeptic night. Attaching the name god to a First Cause doesn’t change a thing, doesn’t illuminate, let alone improve, an irredeemability that is in the world. My own beloved family members: strangers to me.

I had ventured so far out, on this lunar rink. When I heard sounds in the kitchen at three am – the scrape of stainless-steel spoon on the bottom of heavy pot, rhythmic, greedy, happy – it’s Cavendish down there, into the last of the polenta – I felt saved. That sound, of a pot being spooned clean, is wonderful. Basic like the plap-plap of a kitten lapping water, a dog crunching his bone, the click in my son’s throat when he drinks a from a water bottle at the game’s sidelines.

* * * *

“Care” (Sorge) must have been there in the void aboriginally, before matter, or before even matter’s possibility. Out where the laws of mathematics already abode, there was care.

* * * *

We ought not to evaluate ourselves too seriously. I.e., despair doesn’t matter – because we can never be aware of what tune is being played on us.

The valuable thing about an artifact (like for instance the human frame) is its limitations.

(Some of the great performances were captured on cheap audio-equipment tinny as mosquito wings. Chick Berry’s “Maybelline.” The Goodman Quintet’s Carnegie Hall show on wire-recorder. Sam Cooke.)

(Likewise, oil painting is such a great medium precisely because it’s not 3-D; nor does it have Dolby sound. When forced to render fullness on a flat surface, a Van Gogh or a Wyatt or a Grant Wood sends the human spirit’s orchestral blast over that little speaker’s paper cone.)

The girl in Truckee who is beautiful and talented and ambitious, headed for Hollywood, she’s everybody’s lucky mascot – then discovers she has multiple sclerosis. Her right leg onstage started dragging annoyingly.

* * * *

Consider this: Jane Austen was 36 when her first novel was published, then over a period of six years, she published three more novels. Then she died.

So she enjoyed 6 (six) years of seeing a few consequences.

* * * *

January 30, 2013

Leak fixed on evaporative cooler’s copper feed-tube fitting.

Poultry run complete.

* * * *

January 29, 2013

Today the mailbox, after all these years, fell off its post out at the road.

* * * *

Roast chicken.

* * * *

January 26, 2013

A most wonderful human creation: the Periodic Table of Elements. As I get older the Periodic Table of Elements looms large. (For example, larger than Shakespeare.) And, in a way, more my true friend than Shakespeare. (Thankfulness for such a one as Mendeleev. But only as one is thankful for the Hubble constant, the stars of the main sequence, the pH of the soil, etc.) How lucky. The minerals and gases and cold powders minister to my sensations and consciousnesses.

* * * *

January 26, 2013

This creaky old house, espec. the kitchen, is always thronged – Sands, Cavendish, Monica – so that it’s a sticky bramble just to get through.

Then in evening all is quiet – Dash away at a sleepover, Cavendish and Sands off prolonging Robt Burns festivities elsewhere.

Grateful today for the contrived sensation of “certitude,” that there are fixed canons, civility, predictability in our worn paths, daily bread, habit, safety.

Brett, on hips of black stretchpants, has faint cloud-prints of flour because she’s been baking; I pick up Dash at piano lesson in town (where the piano teacher’s house has a negligible little old sign in her home’s window: “Piano Given”), and in the role of father I wait on the couch while the faltering perfection is rehearsed, begun over in earnest; he’s a teenager but his spine posture is perfect when he’s seated at the piano-bench beside Miss Fox, his wrists lifted as doves. Then in the evening, at the usual café, Robt Burns is being recited by the usual suspects just as they did some other year, at this same season – crowded, windows-all-steamed-up. Holy Willie’s Prayer, To a Mousie, the green rushes and the lassies, ho: the sweetest hours that e’er I spent.

Broad Street afterward is empty. Foggy gas-lamp atmosphere. I’m alone, going to my parked car after café, still sentimentally misted-up myself, from Burns. The Nevada Theatre has posted its art-house movie schedule in a vitrine; so I double back, to see what’s playing. But a woman has passed me, walking little dog on a leash (and so veering unpredictably, governed by two wills) and she, too, decides to check out the movie offerings, just ahead of me, and isn’t aware I’m behind her wanting to look over her shoulder: I’m trying courteously not to violate her space; or crowd her; or threaten her in the way women all too often feel threatened – (should I clear my throat?) – standing right behind her, edging to see the poster, and I fear she’ll shriek if she turns and sees I’m there behind her. Then she says loudly, flatly: “If she forgets about the gas and kills herself, well, whatever, she’s gonna do that. Don’t get so invested in stuff you can’t control.” She’s speaking into a microphone somewhere at her lapel. I steal away undetected by her, heading for my car.

* * * *

January 22, 2013

1) Will try for NEA money again, so skimmed thru hard-drive for suitable excerpt to submit.

2) Water tank (mud room closet) is leaking briskly but is totally replaced by noon!

3) In the afternoon, the new poultry run is roughly framed up, all from salvaged old lumber and hardware.

4) Working on Barbara’s deck. She dozes in armchair in sun in doorway, brimmed hat and sunglasses askew.

(On the radio, as I work, it’s simultaneously M.L. King day and Inauguration day, so all the programming is boring.)

(Not a day when much writing got done.)

* * * *

Martin Luther King weekend.

I bring Dash to hear the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal choir at the stone foundry.

An elderly visiting Tibetan Buddhist arrives alone and goes to sit in front, mid-sixties with shaved head. The dyes and fabric-weight of his gown are heavy with authority, everything down to the stitching exotic, as if a camel had shambled into the room. The flat-footedness, the stumpy Mongol build, serenity like a debility.

He sits alone in front row, to one side. Dash and I cease to pay attention to him, the choir onstage is (just like last year, like every year) besieging the big spiritual about Joshua and Jericho – “The walls came a’tumblin’ down” – making their own choir-robes quake. And the next time I look, the old monk has slipped away. His own brand of religion could brook about three minutes of such hilarity.

* * * *

January 20, 2013

Posole.

* * * *

January 16, 2013

3:30. The stars tonight are bright, tho cold snap has been easing.

All stars and galaxies are flying away from me at the rate of 10 miles per second, avg., for the near ones (the more distant, the faster) in all directions in post-Big Bang flight. (The most distant stars run away faster than lightspeed, so they vanish permanently at uttermost perimeter, permanently subtracting information from scientific possibility.) Every time I look up, these years, I think of the fireworks displays of childhood, 4th of July in Evanston, Illinois, the way the big ones popped, then spread over whole sky to the rim of the stadium before the embers had dwindled.

Publishers Weekly has given a solidly-good, “featured” notice of INNOCENCE.

THE ASSISTANT will soon be ready to send again. I’m becoming more confident of new authorial intrusions.

[Don: “If something isn’t working, it either needs to be removed without a trace or built-up hugely and fully.”]

Hunter, in Amherst, is waiting for word of acceptance from every possible grad-program.

Dash is to perform a piano thing at school, as well as a guitar duet with friend Romain.

B) However, this central flicker of my consciousness, which I sense as a steady dependable presence – like my cornea, or my foot-sole (like a Rock-of-Gibraltar personal to myself intimately and inalienably) – is not an ontological reality. Nor is it really “mine.” It is not an autonomous, isolated entity. My consciousness is made out of language and culture, part of the congregant intelligence fostered by evolution (on this lucky wet warm planet).

* * * *

January 13, 2013

Sunday. Dashiell’s birthday.

Now he’s thirteen, and soon the reedy trusting voice will be gone from the house, the warier voice to supplant. No longer the squirrel-like quick passage up the stairs. Entering adolescence he’s going back into a kind of kiln, for a second firing.

The first kiln was the womb’s third trimester, when through the serendipity of fortunate endocrine harmony (estrogen, testosterone, adrenaline, ACTH, LH, all chiming it at their right moments), a personality was well framed in flesh. Now he’s going back into risk again, as the endocrine magic will visit once more. 4 to 6 yrs from now he’ll reemerge from that kiln and there’s no predicting who he’ll be.

* * * *

January 10, 2013

Tracks of bobcat, characteristic fur tufts between pads, in snow this morning – from west cedars by the road, up to compost heap, and then away down lane at trotting gait into south woods. But too small for the one I caught menacing the chickens. Could we have two? Mates? They’re territorial and they must of course mate.

* * * *

January 9, 2013

Too misty for stars. The big owl booms in the east. Never seen him, ever. 4am, coffee, in parka in the driveway. In tall meadow grass lies dewy skateboard, its splintery deck coming unlaminated. Brett’s old inflatable “Gaiam” yoga-exercise ball, punctured, has settled down for good into the old open excavation of west septic tank.

The stars’ death-colored light looks more and more convivial alongside the upper window’s gold nightlight-lamp glow, where human breath is humid.

Cavendish is definitely moving in now. Both of his old cars now take up space here, which is unprecedented, and the freezer fills with his TV dinners. He says the bear has emptied his trailer out, into the clearing; so his stay here will be indefinite. He hadn’t visited the place for many weeks, as he has been sleeping on Sands’s couch. He is expecting repeat visits of a habituated bear, in his canyon.

But this AM only one car is here, so last night he never came home. It’s possible that he made a hospitable new friend. Or, one has to picture him sleeping in the cab of his truck behind the theater building. Or on a half-decorated stage-set’s “fainting couch.”

* * * *

Now I can fall asleep thinking of that fishing town, Popotla, as a comfort and soporific.

Long wave recedes, from curved floor of sand-beach that is hard and shining like a dance floor.

Boats dragged up on keels, to where dunes are always dry. Umbrella stabbed into sand for shade, and shellfish brought under knife, with lime, garlic, Dos Equis, not many gringos, la musica: ranchero-style songs of the sorrows of working for WalMart.

That and the magic-trick of “Anthropic Teleology.”

* * * *

January 5, 2013

to airport, for his last semester ever. In the night, the alarm clock started honking at 2:15 AM. His big duffel of red canvas. In it, the old-fashioned Bialetti stovetop espresso, a Christmas present, which he carries off as part of his equipment for life.

Airport trip: I always did enjoy the three-AM conversations by the light of the dashboard, on empty I-80. They always got so widely philosophical and confident.

Cavendish has moved back out – into his forest trailer in the river canyon, so will be neither at Sands’s house nor here at ours. But during his long absence from his place, the bear has broken in and been living there.

Sands takes Dash, today, to Alasdair’s “fiddle camp” in the old foundry building in town.

So. As of this week, we’ve shrunken back, again, to our winter foursome. Shrunken a bit more now, around B’s deepening senescence.

* * * *

January 2, 2013

Joan, in Squaw – this week newly a widow at 85 – gets into her four-wheel-drive Subaru Forester to drive here, alone over the summit from Squaw, to visit her best friend of sixty years Barbara. This so the two can commiserate (about widowhood, etc). She gets lost on the way. Anxious phone calls from Kait.

But she makes it. Subaru skids into the driveway with a rattle of gravel like a hotrodding teenager. They go out to Matteo’s Public for lunch, plus wine – the genuine undiluted kind – with Brett and Sands as their chaperones.

* * * *

Hunter, here, is to cut brush in south woods as firebreak. Will return to Amherst Saturday. Roast beef. In mud room we all watch a documentary, “Catfish,” and afterwards talk about whether it was authentic or a hoax.

* * * *

Response to people who wonder why I attend Episcopal (or even any) church services. Or practice any regular contemplation.

After all, they say, the questions a religion pretends to “answer” are by nature the unanswerable kind. And they’re right.

Here is my only response: Yes, most people do take an interest only in what they already have an opinion about. And go where there’s certainty.

But there’s no adventure in that. Plus, real inquiry goes where there isn’t certainty. Science involves a high tolerance for undecidedness and unknowability. All one gets out of fixed complacencies is prosperity and prestige. You only live once, and I really think it’s better – it really ought to feel imperative! – to take an interest in matters that everybody may find to be uncrackable aporia but which yet have genuine hard consequence. Maybe it’s as a habituated writer that I’m habituated to undecidedness and unknowability Out in spiritual hinterland, past the barrier beyond which Wittgenstein counseled “only silence,” it’s possible that there are cognizabilities. To discern them doesn’t mean they can’t remain safely out there in their tall silences.